Guess in 10: Deadly Dinosaurs

Game 5 in our “Reviews Leading Up to the February Half Term and Valentine’s Day” series is ”Guess in 10: Deadly Dinosaurs.”

Played with Jack(.8.) and Toby(5)

“Guess in 10: Deadly Dinosaurs” is a trivia game and part of Skillmatics’ “Guess in 10” series. The general idea of the game is that each player takes turns with a card, and the other players then have 10 turns to ask questions in order to try and work out what is on the card.

Just to give you some context, this was actually a Christmas present that Henry(2) received from a great-aunt. Considering Toby(5) received a toy clearly designed for a two-year-old, we made the leap that this present was actually meant for Toby.

Either way, this game has the always slightly cringe-worthy “ages 8 to 99” marking, with the lower suggested age being 8. Now, before we get into the mechanics of the game, I want to say that while this is marketed as expert level, I must say that unless you are extremely knowledgeable about dinosaurs, this is just going to be an impossible feat to do.

As a lifelong fan of dinosaurs and with children who also love dinosaurs, I reckon I probably recognize a third of the dinosaurs on these cards, and only about half of that would I have any chance of guessing.

To be honest, unless you are a palaeontologist or really study dinosaurs to quite some considerable detail, I could not actually see anyone who might pick this game up knowing enough about dinosaurs to make this a viable product.

So when you play the game, essentially you get a card that is a bit top-trumpy, and this has all of the information on it, and the other team or player then gets to ask questions to try and guess what dinosaur is (assuming they’ve ever heard about it). One game we quite enjoy playing in the car with the boys is 20 Questions, but obviously, here it was decided that 10 was enough.

So we tried, and in the end, we gave up when we only managed to get a handful of dinosaurs that we even recognized, let alone could guess in a trivia scenario.

Production values aren’t great either. The box is folded card rather than the standard greyboard which never bolds well for longevity, the card have an ok finish to them but are a little thin. The box the game comes in is also way larger than it needs to be. The cards themselves are designed well however and the info is nicely presented.

Now, looking at the “Guess in 10” concept as a whole, I could see there being some interest if the subject matter was slightly less impenetrable, but there are way better trivia games out there, and considering there are actually quite a few of these as well as a digital version, I struggle to see any appeal in these at all that could not be achieved by looking up a random dinosaur on Wikipedia.

My recommendation is to not buy this and instead just play 20 Questions… in fact, why not play the board game “20 Questions”!