You have most kids on board just with the plastic dinosaurs: open up the box and the first thing you'll see is a bag of plastic dinosaurs. They are your playing pieces. There's also a deck of cards and a double-sided board because Dinosaur Dash is a board game that 2-6 players can play competitively or cooperatively, choosing the appropriate playing board.
As a competitive game, Dinosaur Dash is race game where each player is trying to get their dinosaur to the finish line ahead of the others. There aren't the usual dice tho', this game is card driven. Everyone has a hand of three cards and these each show a number (1-5) and a number pointing left or right. On your turn you play a card, move your dinosaur that number of spaces and, if you reach a fork in the road, you follow the direction indicated on your card. Land on a bonus space and you move further forward, and you also move forward a space if you land on another player's dinosaur. It's an easy-to-play game that even quite young children can join in with just as soon as they've learnt to recognise numerals. Tho' there's not a huge amount of agency (you are just choosing between the three cards in your hand), younger children will benefit from this easy introduction to hand management, learning that there can sometimes be circumstances where it can be advantageous to play a lower value rather than higher numbered card.
The cooperative mode for Dinosaur Dash is similar except that players' dinosaurs are being chased by raptors. These move after every player has taken a turn. They ordinarily move four spaces but you can make the game easier by reducing their movement to three or make the game more difficult by raising their movement to five spaces. To win, the players have to get all their dinosaurs to the finish line but they lose if a raptor enters a space occupied by any of the players' dinosaurs. The players' dinosaurs ordinarily have a three-space headstart over the raptors but the pursuers' steady movement makes this mode quite challenging for the players, and tense and exciting too as the raptors are almost always close at heel. There's a special rule in this mode whereby a player whose dinosaur lands in a bonus space can additionally move the dinosaur of another player one space forward. This modicum of active cooperation is often what enables players to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by keeping the dinosaur at the rear of the pack another step from the jaws of a pursuing velociraptor. Again a useful lesson for younger players.
Dinosaur Dash isn't going to win any awards for novel game play but it's a fast fun children's game - particularly exciting in its cooperative mode. Neural Forge are planning to bring the game to Kickstarter in January. We'll add a link to the campaign when it goes live.