A Prehistoric New Year

There were only three of us in for the first club-night of the year, and I took along Palaeo Diet. Caesar has played one before, a couple of years ago, but Dave was new to it, so we started with a cooperative hunt. I wanted to keep it simple but somehow it escalated, and we ended up with six hunters (two each) stalking two large rhinos and a herd of horses, with a couple of wolves waiting in the wings. The hunters approached from three directions.

Early moves saw the horses startled and stampeded through the brush in the centre of the board.

I put my hunters into ambush, the plan being for Caesar worked his hunters between the brush and the wood, and drive the horses down to me. Instead he started a rhino, which charged into the brush, sprung my ambushes and then attacked the hunters. This attracted the wolves and, frankly, things went downhill from there for my two hunters.

One of them was killed by a wolf.

So we now had an angry, wounded rhino in play, and still hadn't managed to injure any horses.

Caesar did finally bring down a horse, and this caused the others to scatter.

The wolves kept chasing after my surviving hunter, who managed to kill one with a well-aimed arrow.

Caesar got attacked by a cross horse.

By now it was chaos - arrows were flying, horses were running, the other rhino was getting agitated and there was a wolf just looking for mischief.

Finally one of Dave's hunters killed the second wolf. With the two wolves and a horse we had enough meat to count this as a successful hunt, despite the loss of one of the hunters.

In future games where there are predators in play I might stipulate that, for a successful hunt, predator meat cannot make up more than half of the tally. It's just not as nutritious and tasty.

Anyway, we set up a second game. This time we had one hunter each, and were competing to be the new tribal chief. This meant either killing a great bear within eight turns or, failing that, killing more giant birds and horses than any of the other hunters.

Caesar's club-armed hunter went after some horses, which turned on him, and attracted the bear as well. Amazingly he escaped unscathed. This was a sign.

The bear turned on Dave's hunter, who had just descended the hill, and ripped him to pieces. Dave's hunter would not be the new chief.

Caesar killed a horse and was wounded by the bear.

My hunter had a bow. I'd injured one horse, but Caesar had finished it off to give him two kills. I didn't fancy my chances of killing the bear, so I decided that I would also be chief if I was the only hunter to survive the hunt. So I goaded the bear into attacking Caesar's hunter.

It did, but Caesar fought it off again.

Caesar then decided to consolidate his winning position by scattering the remaining herbivores so that I couldn't kill them.

And then he goaded the bear into attacking me. I ended up injured.

The bear lost interest after that and went back to a horse carcass. The game ended with Caesar having killed two horses, so he was proclaimed chief. And he deserved it, being a mighty hunter, a bold bear-fighter and a right sneaky bastard.

So that's the New Year off to a good start.