Xoe Allred’s Velocirapture is hard to describe, one suspects by design. There’s a shortcut in games criticism that’s tempting to invoke, wherein anything perplexing gets labeled a “tone poem.” Velocirapture, however, is not a tone poem so much as it is a garbled signal about the all-too-human tendency to talk around a difficult topic.

Here’s the box pitch: A meteor streaks across the Cretaceous sky. Extinction looms. But nobody wants to talk about that. Instead, these dinosaurs intend to play human games until the very end. As pitches go, it’s a knee-slapper. Largely in part because it’s so very recognizable. Just ask every single person who’s suffered from unusual bleeding or a misplaced lump and didn’t schedule a doctor’s visit right away. We are such odd creatures. Apparently, so were the dinosaurs.

Cope harder.

There are only a handful of “important” rules in Velocirapture. The first and most ironclad of these has to do with identity. With your immolation only minutes away, you’re asked to select a coping method. The entire game, such as it is, can be found on thirty-six cards, and before you dig into the symbols and bullet points, their main detail is how you will cope with the coming extinction event.

So you choose one. Perhaps you will cope by misinterpreting the human game rules on purpose. Or you’ll add physical challenges to the human games. Maybe you’ll help a specific dino at the table win as many of the human games as possible. Here’s my favorite: Cope by including your surroundings in the human games. For the next five minutes — or however long you will engage with this bizarre artifact — this is your guiding star.

The short playtime isn’t listed as one of the important rules, but it ought to be. The first time we played Velocirapture, we gave ourselves 20 minutes. The experience went stale around minute eight. But the meteor was still tearing the atmosphere to shreds, so we soldiered on. That’s another things humans do. We persist for the sake of completing things. Just ask everybody who’s ever wrapped up a Netflix series even after it became plain that the service ordered too many episodes.

The two extremes of the human games.

Okay: Human Games. Every minute or two, you’ll draw a card and read its rules. Depending on the suit, chance, and your own capacity to fill in the gaps, these are a hodgepodge of playable ditties, half-comprehensible outlines, and jokes. For as long as Velocirapture stays fresh, there’s a whimsical undercurrent to the whole thing. One game, the Syzygy Continuum, is all illegibly small footnote text. Another, Conquerors of the, is unfinished. The dino scrawl at the bottom of the card points out as much. Others are more complete, or freeform, or legitimately enjoyable. An early favorite, Mosh Pit, is vague, but basically comes across as a three-sentence version of Sidereal Confluence. Don’t get too excited. It plays like a three-sentence version of Sidereal Confluence too.

Years ago, I remember there being a minor craze for “metagames,” little decks of cards that were meant to be played across the course of an entire game night. Some functioned as ways to vote on what to play next, either by tricking people into buying rudimentary vote cards (oops) or giving priority to the player who had lost the previous title. Another created a behavioral minigame that awarded points as you played other games. Like, say, making a suboptimal move that benefited a buddy, or saying something nice every five minutes. Cute, but also the sort of thing that wears thin after about eight minutes.

Velocirapture reminds me of those, but maybe with a few extra teeth, or else a velociraptor’s big toenail. It’s cute, but a little barbed too, an acknowledgement that we’re passing the time before we return to the soil. From a certain perspective, it’s a tough message. Just ask anybody who’s felt suddenly old when they read one of those cynical messages on social media. You know the type: “You were today years old when you realized that 1999 is closer to 1931 than to 2023.” Velocirapture is like that but with a comforting nudge rather than a finger in the eye. We all cope in our own ways. That doesn’t mean all coping is equivalent.

What are these for? I’m not sure.

I doubt anybody would be surprised to discover that I prefer Allred’s Persuasion, last year’s satirical take on courtship, romance, and the happy ending of bachelorhood, to Velocirapture. Because Velocirapture is so bound up in its punchline, it’s more tangible as a statement than as a plaything. When a friend asked about it on my table, we laughed over the description. Played in small amounts, it’s amusing, even perceptive. Like any bit that repeats on a loop, it quickly overstays its welcome. Just ask the folks who endured those twenty minutes with me. The first few human games were a delight. The next handful wore thin. After that, we couldn’t stop ourselves from checking the sky.

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A complimentary copy was provided.