The first Jurassic Park movie, released in 1993, was a landmark film featuring many legendary filmmakers operating at the height of their power such as Steven Spielberg and John Williams. It heralded the birth of dinosaurs that looked and felt real with a mixture of practical effects and terrifying CGI. Even though it proved fatal to many film characters, film goers have wanted to return to the park many times over the years.
Since then, many fans have felt a sense of diminishing returns. Spielberg struggled to recreate the magic himself with Jurassic Park: The Lost World. The most recent movie, Jurassic Park Rebirth is splitting the difference between a 51% critic rating and a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Still, the concept of a real dinosaur theme park has remained lodged in pop culture ever since. Video games like Dino Crisis and several official Jurassic Park games have kept the dream alive. Tabletop games like Dinosaur Island give fans a chance to see if their management style would be better than John Hammond.
A new tabletop role playing game, Raptor Ruckus from Snapback Game Studios, is currently funding on Kickstarter. It’s a game soaked in 90’s nostalgia for the original film that asks if you could survive a dinosaur park breakdown. The Quickstart rules currently aailable for download give a glimpse into how the designers will approach classic survival horror concepts on the tabletop.
The game uses the MORK BORG rules set as the baseline. It’s a simple system built for quick play, brutal combat and easy character build to replace ones that die in battle. The classes promised in the full game resemble characters from the films like the Rock Star of Ian Malcolm to the Smelly Kids of Hammond’s grandkids Lex and Tim.
One of the new mechanical ideas for this game gives the dinos two targets for players for whittle down. They can attack the dinosaurs and cause them to lose hit points. But more intriguing is the concept of Tenacity and trying to outwit the creatures and get them to lose interest.
The films don’t have a lot of combat and usually, when they do, it doesn’t go well for the humans. Instead, the survivors trick, outrun and hide from dinosaurs in the hope they’ll lose interest or seek out easier prey. Whenever a player pulls one of these manervers, the dinosaur’s Tenacity score goes down and if it gets low enough, the players win the encounter as the dino removes itself as a threat.
Fans who want to try out the game now can do so by playing “A Day Off” included in the Quickstart. Rather than choose a class, players start off as Understaffed Workers, the future dino snacks working at the big science theme park for minimum wage. They can choose pre-generated characters if they wish to jump right into play, or take a few moments to make some unsuspecting working class heroes who will try to survive an island-wide power outage.
My favorite part of running this scenario, besides sharing bad job interview stories with the players as we made characters, was the collection of odd jobs the players had to do before things get scary. Atrociraptors show up to try and eat everybody soon enough but in many ways that’s preferable to having to unclog a toilet or check for food spoilage in the kitchen.
The full release will contain a complete island escape campaign plus a handful of set-piece expansions that can work as one shots or additional scenes in the campaign. I hope they include the Staffer rules as an option because I think starting out with a bunch of innocent workers and coming out with a hardened, grizzled dinosaur hunter sounds like a great story to tell. The clash between the mundane real world and the myth of dinosaurs is one of the reasons people keep coming back to these movies.
The Quickstart did a great job at capturing the terror and the humanity of the Jurassic Park films. The Kickstarter runs through September 25th, 2025. Digital files are expected in Q2 2026 while the physical game expects to ship in Q3 or Q4 of the same year.
