tooth

  • Super Tooth
  • Designer: Neil J. Opitz
  • Publisher: Gamewright
  • Plays 2–4
  • Ages 6+
  • Playing Time: 10–15 minutes
  • Initial Release: 2015
  • Elevator Pitch: Race to collect matching dinosaur cards to earn tooth tokens, all the while avoiding natural disasters that mess with your hand.
  • Roar Score: 5/5

There’s no point in denying it: we’re unashamed Gamewright fanatics in this house. Especially their card games. So easy to teach and learn. So much fun to play. Perfect for almost all ages. I don’t think we’ve found a bad one.

Super Tooth is the latest in their “small box” line of card games. Gameplay is relatively simple (my 3-year-old son can absolutely hold his own), and the dino theme obviously appeals to the target audience (and me…gotta be honest).

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Players take turns drawing cards from the “Landscape” — three face-up cards. On your turn, you can resolve events, feed or chase away meat eaters, and collect plant eaters.

Event cards have various effects. Not all of them are intuitive, and since there’s no text on any of the cards (aside from the event names), it’s a good idea to keep the rule sheet handy. The first few times you play, you’ll be consulting the rules for what to do when these six cards pop up. If I have a complaint with this game (and I’ll admit this is relatively minor), it’s that it’s sometimes hard to remember what to do to resolve these events.

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Meat-eater cards can be fed or chased away from the Landscape. Each card has an image of one or two plant-eaters on the upper-right corner — their preferred meal. You can either offer up one of these plant-eaters as a meal (from the Landscape or your hand) or use a triceratops to chase it away.

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Once the Landscape is empty of events and meat-eaters, then you can collect plant-eaters. Depending on what’s available, you can collect 1, 2, or 3 matching cards. You can then trade in matching sets of plant-eaters from your hand for tooth tokens. Be the first to collect 3 (or 5, in a 2-player game) tooth tokens, and you win!

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The rules may seem a little complex at first, but trust me — my 3-year-old picked it up after one game, and he plays like a champ now. It’s the perfect amount of challenge for young gamers, yet it’s still simple and fun enough for them to enjoy and want to play again and again.

Thankfully, it’s not just a simple collecting game. Sometimes, you won’t have the cards to be able to feed or chase away a meat-eater in the Landscape. When that happens, the Landscape gets cleared, and your turn is over.

Also, the event cards really can mess up your hand. For example, the T-rex card combines everyone’s hands and then redistributes the cards evenly to all players.

It didn’t take long for Super Tooth to become a favorite in this house. Not a day goes by (honestly, not an hour goes by) that my son doesn’t pop up out of nowhere and ask, “Will you play Super Tooth now?”

My favorite part, though? Hearing him casually say words like “sarcosuchus” and “plateosaurus” during the game.

Like almost all Gamewright games, this one comes highly recommended!

(Disclosure: I received a review copy of Super Tooth for review purposes. All opinions are my own.)

Jamie Greene
Jamie is a publishing/book nerd who makes a living by wrangling words together into some sense of coherence. Away from The Roarbots, Jamie is a road trip aficionado and an obsessed traveler who has made his way through 33 countries (and counting). Elsewhere on the interwebs, he's a contributor to SYFY Wire and StarWars.com and hosted The Great Big Beautiful Podcast for more than five years. Watch The Roarbots on Youtube

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