We’ve had six Jurassic Park films – and a CGI animated spin off series – warning us of the danger of opening zoological attractions featuring carnivorous beasts that shouldn’t be sharing the world with humans, but clearly the proprietors of Dragon Parks took no heed.

In fairness, the titular parks seem like fairly innocuous places, at least until angry dragons are replaced or the sheep on their islands run out.

When either of those events occur, you’ll see visitors – who’ve been lured to the islands to view the spectacular dragons – suddenly disappear.

No prizes for guessing where they’re disappearing to. Let’s just say the dragons will have sated their hunger for a little while.

Dragon Parks is a game for 2-6 players and – visitor disappearance aside – is a great game to play with any age of participant.

Even with the aforementioned disappearance of visitors, it’s all dressed up in such a cutesy aesthetic (and without any explicit reference to visitors being eaten, they’re just ‘subtracted’ from your visitor total) that it all feels fairly harmless.

In Dragon Parks, players all lay one of their transparent cards on one of their three islands, then pass the rest of their hand to the player on their left.

If an egg is covered by a dragon, you’ll earn a bonus visitor. Cover up an angry dragon (denoted by a fierce looking symbol) and, as already explained, you lose a visitor.

Players simultaneously choose, reveal and then lay their chosen card on their island before doing the same with the cards they’ve been passed; once three cards have been placed on one or more of their islands, it’s the end of the season and scoring takes place.

Bonus visitors are given for specific types of dragon depending on the season, as well as earning a legendary dragon token if you have the most yellow dragons at the end of the season.

Then more visitors are added for each type of dragon on every island you have and a new season begins, until all three seasons have been played.

At the end of a season, if there aren’t enough sheep to feed each dragon, visitors are lost – one for each sheep less than the number of dragons overall.

It’s a game that takes a little while to get your head around in terms of how to do well, but no time at all to actually get started playing.

Nor does it take long to actually play, especially as turns and scoring are pretty much done simultaneously.

The transparent cards are brilliant – and it’s really satisfying to be able to layer them on top of each other to change the mixture of dragons and sheep on your island, along with the instant satisfaction of ‘hatching’ eggs.

Unfortunately, the transparent plastic cards seem prone to damage; my copy had numerous cards scratched, dented and even cracked before they’d even been removed from their shrink-wrap.

Thankfully, it doesn’t matter in gameplay terms if the cards are a little damaged, but it’s still disheartening to open a brand new game and find it has components in less than pristine condition.

Those aside, the components are very well designed, with the lovely aesthetic seen on the box carried through to the rest of the game’s components.

Dragon Parks is a nicely designed and unique little game that’s really easy to learn and teach, though it may take a round or two for the scoring to settle into your brain (though the included player aids do help); it offers a neat little puzzle to solve on each turn with card placement.

Player interaction and direct conflict is really low, with only the cards being passed along that’ll allow you to control what other players get to do, though in my experience it’s rare that you’re going to be taking much notice of their islands above maximising the scoring opportunity on your own.

It’s a fun little game and there is little else like it that I’ve ever played – it’s one that’s definitely worth checking out, as long as you’re not expecting too much strategic depth or competitive play.

You can buy Dragon Parks from Amazon here.