It’s T-Rex versus tentacles in this week’s round-up of tabletop titles vying for your attention on Kickstarter. And if building a Technicolor dinosaur park or waging weird war Down Under aren’t your thang, we’ve also picked out a lovely lil’ Japanese game about birds. D’aaw.

DINOSAUR ISLAND

Pandasaurus Games is running a new campaign for 2017 crowd funding success Dinosaur Island, a well-received worker placement game that lets you live out your Jurassic Park fantasies of running a dino-packed theme park (complete with awesome 90s-style art!). The latest Kickstarter offers another opportunity to snag the sold-out base game with most of the stretch goals from the first campaign, as well as a brand new expansion, Dinosaur Island: Totally Liquid, that introduces new dinos, game mechanics and a fifth player slot, and a standalone two-player game, Duelosaur Island.

AUZTRALIA

While there are more Cthulhu-themed games out there than you can shake a shoggoth at, AuZtralia caught our eye for two reasons – its unusual Aussie setting and the fact that it’s designed by Martin Wallace, the chap behind titles such as Brass, Steam and A Few Acres of Snow. Inspired by Wallace’s own A Study in Emerald, AuZtralia is a 1-4 player adventure/exploration game set in an alternate 1930s. Faced with the imminent return of the ghastly Old Ones, players race to recruit armies, construct railways and generally rebuild Australia in time to save it from be-tentacled doom.

SONGBIRDS

The English edition of cutesy-named Japanese card game Birdie Fight, Songbirds is a smart but simple little game with super pretty artwork. Players take on the roles of forest spirits, each seeking to make their chosen colour of songbird the most successful – placing their numbered bird cards in a grid to get the highest totals in each row and column. Okay, so thematic it ain’t, but Songbirds is easy to learn, looks utterly charming, doesn’t take long to play and has more strategy than might first appear. Also one of the Kickstarter promo cards is an owl – and owls, as everyone knows, are the best.