We’ve all wanted to be members of a prehistoric tribe, hunting dinosaurs for dinner and competing to be the next tribal chief, right? Right. Well, now you can, because that’s the premise of the board game Ooga!
In Ooga!, the board is a randomized array of dino tiles, comprised of 5 different color-coded species on 3 different terrains, as well as the occasional coconut (for nutritional balance, of course). The Tribal Chief flips over a menu, which will be the goal until it’s completed — for instance, 1 red, 1 purple, 1 green and 2 blues. The aim is to collect all the dinosaurs on the menu, at which point you call out “Ooga!” discard those tiles, collect the menu, and become the next Tribal Chief. The game ends once all 12 menus have been completed, at which point whoever has the most of them wins.
The catch is that you can only pick up the dino tiles which not only match at least one color on the menu, but also a terrain from the current bones. Each hunt, the current Tribal Chief will toss the four bones, and whichever flip picture-side-up are available that round. One of these, rather than a terrain, marks Coconuts as fair game, which act as a wild card to replace any one dinosaur when completing a menu.
I should also probably mention that once the bones are thrown, you collect dinosaurs on a first-come, first-serve basis by stabbing them with a suction cup on a stick. (Sorry, I meant a “spear.”) The round ends as soon as all but one of the players has caught a tile, or, since we were playing two-player, once each has caught one. Mom refers to this as “the matchy and stabby game,” and honestly if that’s not incentive to try it I don’t know what is.
(Apparently I’ve already done a write-up for this game, but I forgot until after I had already written this one, so… if you didn’t try Ooga! the last time I posted about it, maybe you’ll try it now.)
