A-Hunting We Will Go

Catherine and Maya like to hang out and play games together on the PS4. They like narrative adventure games, and one of their favourites from last year was 'Horizon Zero Dawn' (HZD). Now I can't say I was following it closely (I hide somewhere else when they're making all their video-game noise), but it's some kind of post-apocalypse game where 'primitive' humans hunt, or are hunted by, machine animals. Sort of 'Clan of the Cave-Bear', but with robot mammoths. And robot cave-bears.

(Fun Fact: Our cat Aloy is named after the main protagonist of the game. That's how much they liked it. Also I got a hard stare when I wondered why the forthcoming sequel isn't called 'Horizon One Dawn'.)

Anyway, I don't recall the conversation exactly, but at some point the idea of playing out HZD with miniatures was mooted. And I remembered that I'd seen a set of Ganesha Games rules advertised (and blogged about) that covers people hunting animals (albeit fleshy animals).

So that, dear reader, is why I downloaded a copy of Ganesha Games' 'Palaeo Diet'.

And I remembered that in my lead pile was a pack of assorted 15mm cavemen from Irregular Miniatures, plus a couple of Mike Yarrow mammoths. They were bought for one of those HOTT projects that floats through my brain from time to time, and then gets buried after I've bought the toys.

So I dug them out and painted them. I added some cattle I had around, and a couple of dogs. Maybe I'll do a post showcasing them. But for now ...

A lone mammoth grazes peacefully on some European plain.

Four hunters approach. Two have spears, one a sling and the fourth a mighty club.

This is the basic learning scenario. You have four hunters stalking one mammoth. The hunters have to kill the mammoth whilst losing no more than one of their number. That's it.

Catherine and I took two hunters each. She had the two with spears, whilst I had the slinger and clubman. We decided to be clever, circling the spearmen around the side of the beast, stationing the slinger on a hill and using the clubman to drive the mammoth towards the spearmen.

Two hunters wait in ambush. In the distance the clubman sneaks towards the mammoth. Except that he didn't sneak. The game uses activation dice, and failed activations cause nearby animals to react. And the clubman kept failing activations.

Despite his blundering he got close enough to the mammoth to attack it, but simply made it cross.

Wounded, he backed off, as the mammoth bellowed again and again. This forces hunters to test not to fall back away from the creature. As you can see, some failed and fell back.

Not this one though. He crept up, threw a spear and inflicted the first wound.

The other spearman moved up and inflicted another hit, enraging the mammoth which attacked the first hunter, wounding him.

Hunters can only take two wounds, so it pays to be cautious with injured ones. The spearman backed off.

By this stage we'd given up ambushing; it's useful for getting attacks against fast-moving creatures, but with a penalty to hit, no good against a bulky animal like the mammoth. They need a brute-force approach.

The mammoth tried to escape the harrying hunters.

The slinger attracted its attention, though, and it charged, but didn't quite reach. The slinger backed off.

One of Catherine's spears inflicted a third wound, and my clubman finally got his act together to score the fourth for the kill.

We got our kill, at the cost of two injured huters.

And we really enjoyed the game. Basically it uses the Ganesha risk/reward activation system, but with failed activations triggering reactions for the animals on the table. Certain player actions can also cause reactions - attacks for example, or simply shouting at the animal to scare it. Combat is simply a matter of  using actions to attack, and rolling equal to or higher than the target's defence. Some weapons have modifiers to this roll - clubs/axes get a bonus, but can only be used in direct contact, whilst a bow/sling has a long range but always attacks with a penalty.

Anyway, we tried a different setup. The same four hunters, on the same terrain, but this time hunting a small herd of cattle. As small grazers these react differently to the larger beasts. Strictly small grazers represent animals more timid than cattle, but these are all of the figures I had. For a win the hunters needed to bring down two. How hard could it be?

Harder than we though. The reaction table for small grazers makes them very skittish, and as we approached with our 'charge and stick spears in them' plan, they ran away.

They split up into two pairs, heading around different sides of a rock outcrop. We decided to ignore the two going around the top of the picture, for reasons which will become clear later, and concentrated our efforts on the others.

The clubman got in close, and inflicted the first wound. The beast retaliated, but they're not as dangerous as mammoths, and the hunter survived.

A birds-eye view of the action.

Two cattle we were ignoring fled off the board.

We got one animal, but the other ran towards the table edge as well. We'd have to be very careful to coax it back into play, and avoid losing it.

Very careful indeed. At the start of the game we'd randomly placed a terror-bird in a corner. This is a aggressive predator, but up to this point hadn't seen the action unfolding on the other side of the outcrop. But now my hunters were passing within its field of view, and a botched activation saw it rush into the attack.

At about this point the bull we were stalking fled off the table.

To win we'd have to kill the predator, which had just anough bulk to satisfy our food target.

A larger predator watched the action. Actually the Aloy referred to above.

The terror-bird attacked the clubman, wounding him, but took a hit in return.

Catherine closed up with her spears, whilst the slinger fell back. Unfortunately they weren't fast enough to save their comrade, who failed to kill the giant carnivore and was brought down.

But as Aloy watched they stabbed the bird with their spears ...

And finally killed it.

Another successful hunt, albeit that we lost a hunter.

The key to the game is firstly managing your activation dice - the same as for most Ganesha Games products - but in also understanding the possibilities of the reaction tables for each type of animal. Get close to the mammoth and it will roar and attack, but at least stay roughly where it is. Get too close to the grazers without a clear plan, and they'll flee or maybe even stampede before you know what's happening. And the predator is just plain nasty.

We enjoyed both of these games a lot, and I'll certainly be playing some more. It's mostly designed as a solo or cooperative game, although scenarios with opposed hunters are possible as well. And I have a few more models to paint up for variety.