Dances With Wolves

I had a quiet day yesterday, so gave my new wolves a few outings in some games of Palaeo Diet.

I started with a simple hunt. Three hunters are stalking a couple of mammoths, with a couple of wolves waiting in the wings to mess things up.

The hunters split up. The one on the right was tasked with trying to scare the wolves away from the action. They were unimpressed by his efforts, but remained content to watch at this stage.

The others tried to split up the mammoth pair, trying to drive one further away from the wolves so that when the stabbing started the predators would be less inclined to close in for a look.

The mammoths were skittish, though, and even got unsettled enough to attack one of the hunters.

They steadfastly refused to be split up.

A hunter was attacked and injured. The wolves moved a little closer, scenting blood.

One of the hunters managed to wound a mammoth, but was wounded in return. This made the wolves very interested indeed, and they closed rapidly on the action, attacking the third hunter. He wounded the wolf.

Abandoning the mammoth another hunter came to the support of the one being attacked by the wolf, and finished the beast off. The second wolf now came into the attack, and was also wounded.

The two hunters managed to finish off the injured wolf. This gave them enough bulk for a win. With two injured hunters going after a mammoth wasn't really on the cards. The wolves would have to do.

I then had a go at one of the scenarios from the book, in which a group of hunters raid a wolf-den looking to steal puppies (either to train as hunting dogs or as a tasty snack). The den is in the centre of the board, and four wolves are hanging around it. Each of the four hunters enters from one of the corners, and at least two of them have to grab puppies and make it off the edge of the board.

It started badly when the wolves decided that they weren't taking any nonsense today and one of them attacked and approaching hunter.

The hunter got in a hit, but the wolf was faster and it killed him.

Another hunter was attacked. 

With the attention of most of the wolves fixed on the potential feat to the south, the other two hunters were able to reach the den undetected.

The second hunter was also killed, and the wolves all closed in for a feed.

The two hunters to the north grabbed some puppies and headed off home unmolested.

So technically a win for the hunters, even if they did lose two of their number. The wolves dined well.

I played it again, with different terrain.

Again, one of the hunters attracted the attention of a wolf. He wounded the animal, which backed off, and the other wolves came over for a look.

Thoroughly agitated they attacked a second hunter, and killed him (yes, the first one to die in the previous run-through).

And, much as before, this kept the wolves' attention away from their den, allowing the two other hunters a go at grabbing puppies.

Or maybe not. One of the wolves came running back to defend the den.

One hunter evaded the attack and was already well on the way home. The other got away as well. The third hunter was now also closing in on the den, but the wolves were all on their way back.

He got a puppy, and managed to wound one of the wolves attacking him. But he was now injured, and the whole pack were after him.

The end was inevitable.

So the same result as before - two hunters got away with a prize, whilst two became wolf food.

New Beasts

Yesterday I got out my paints and brushes for the first time in months and did a few new animals for Palaeo Diet.

First to be completed were these wolves from Slave2Gaming, part of their Grim Fantasy range. I used some of these in a game back in May, and loved the energetic poses, so I got Drew to bring me a couple of packs when we had our club Christmas meetup last week. So not only have I managed to paint some figures, but I did it within a week of receiving them.

Here's the pack.

The range actually has two different wolf packs (did you see what I did there). One is listed as Dire Wolves, and in it you get these big boys.

The other is just listed as Wolves, and features these lively chaps. They are smaller than the Dire Wolves, as you can see above.

Here's the Dire Wolves with an Irregular Miniatures caveman.

And a couple of the regular wolves as a comparison.

To be honest the size difference isn't too jarring, and I'd generally field both types of figure as a basic pack predator.

The second lot of new figures I did are based on some miniatures I acquired over 20 years ago. Over the past couple of years I've been building up a selection of Australian creatures, and in theory I have something suitable for all of the basic creature types except for the giant grazers. There's not really many options for these in the Australian megafauna, but the most obvious choice is the giant wombat, Diprotodon. So I set out to make some, since you can't get any commercially (this is a hint to any figure manufacturers who may be reading this).

Anyway, to go back to my original statement, I used some small toy bears that I acquired around 20 years ago. Their body shape is about right, as is the size, so the only real issue was their faces which, being bears, are somewhat pointer and more carnivore-like than the wombat/koala-featured Diprotodon. Milliput came to the rescue.

"You've made bears with masks", said my wife.

Anyway, a very quick paint-job later and they ended up like this.

They're not perfect - the original figures is a bit primitive, and my Milliput skills are a little shaky at present - but they'll do. I can always go back and tidy them up another day. And overall I'm happy with how they've turned out. They look the part.

Here they are with my hapless hunter.

I do have a pack of Mike Yarrow short-faced kangaroos to paint as well, which will give me more herd grazers for my collection. The next stage will be to do some hunters to take on all of these Antipodean beasties. It looks like QRF have the molds for the old Feudal Castings Koori miniatures, although they are currently listed as out of stock. If I can get hold of some they will be perfect hunters for an Australian Palaeo Diet game. Until then my new wombats will have to be hunted by my Northern Hemisphere hunters.

Birthday Sharks

Whilst most people spend Christmas Eve getting ready for Christmas day, we spend it celebrating Catherine's birthday, and that usually involves some kind of outing.

This year Catherine had let drop the hint that she wanted to see an extensive exhibition about sharks at the Australian Museum in Sydney, so that's what we did.

It's pretty spectacular; there's lots of information boards and videos, as well as preserved specimens from the museum's collection and some lovely life-sized reproductions of various species.

Anyway, whilst I know that there are people here who would find sharks blog-worthy in their own right, this post was really an excuse to post a few pictures I took that wargamers might find of interest.

Part of the exhibition looked at various Pacific island-groups and nations and how sharks were part of their culture and folklore. I dropped the ball here by not making any notes on some of the mythology and folklore stuff which may of been use to fantasy gamers, but I did get some pictures of some of the weapons and armour on display.

These are two-handed cutting weapons from Kiribati. They're a decent size and, as you can see, edged with shark-teeth.

To protect against them, the natives of Kiribati wore suits of armour. This was made up of a set of overalls and sleeves made from coconut fibre, with a coconut fibre cuirass worn over the top. The  cuirass had a high backboard to protect from attack from behind, and was often worn with thick belts made from woven coconut fiber or dried ray skin to protect the vital organs. The armour decorated, either with human hair, feathers or shells.

The armour was worn with a helmet mad from a dried puffer-fish.

Warriors also sometimes carried knuckle-dusters edged with shark-teeth. These are from Hawaii.

This is a small club or hand-weapon from Hawaii.

For those that love the bizarre, this is a reconstruction of Helicoprion, an extinct shark from the Permian shark with a distinctive helical lower jaw. As the shark closed its lower jaw, the teeth would fold back into the mouth, dragging and cutting anything the shark had caught. It is thought that whilst it fed on soft-bodied animals, it could also use this jaw to deshell such creatures as nautilids, ammonites and belemnites.

And, finally, here is the birthday-girl herself, standing inside a reconstruction of a Megalodon jaw.

 

Christmas Games

I hope you all had a great Christmas! And especially hope that your figure, rules, books and gaming collections were expanded in a way that was satisfactory to you.

I only got one game this year, but that's fine because really I have too much of most things these days. However my wife got a few new games, so we had plenty of stuff to try out over the break. 

First up was Calico, which Catherine decided to buy with some birthday money she had. We got this out on Christmas Day. As you can see, it has a cat-theme, and was therefore designed for Catherine.

In Calico you are making quilts, using a selection of hexagonal tiles which come in combinations of six patterns and six colours.

Grouping together sections of the same colour allows you to add buttons. Grouping together sections of the same pattern attracts cats to your quilt who will sleep on it. Both of these things earn you points.

Attracting a real cat doesn't earn you any extra points, although the first player is the person who most recently petted a cat, so Aloy got some frantic attention early on ...

Each board also has three bonus score tiles, which look complicated, but aren't. These reward you for setting up combinations of patterns and/or colours around the particular scoring tile. You can score for the combination in just colour or just pattern, or go for the extra points of doing it with both pattern and colour.

Part of the way through the game, and I was feeling confident.

My finished quilt. It all went a bit wrong towards the end, when (naturally) I needed tiles of particular patterns and/or colours and they stopped appearing from the bag. That's my excuse anyway. I came last.

Maya won it, by managing to get maximum points of all of her bonus scoring tiles.

I think Maya got a score that was almost equal to mine and Catherine's combined. 

The game has a special 'Master Quilter' tile you get to hold as a trophy if you win. You are then obliged to have your photo taken.

Catherine and I then had a go at another of her gifts - a word-game called 'A Little Wordy', from the people who brought us 'Exploding Kittens'.

This is a fairly simple two-player game. Both players draw eleven letter tiles from a bag and secretly construct a word, of any length, from them, making a note of it. You then hand the tiles you drew to your opponent, and take it in turns to guess what word they might have constructed using them.

So here's my word (FONT) and my notes on what I know about Catherine's word - it ends in 'E', it's not GLEE or EXILE, it contains an 'L', it doesn't contain an 'H' and it's more than four letters in length. But how do I know all that?

I knew those things because on your turn you can either guess the opponents word, or activate one of eight clue cards that are dealt out at the start of the game, and which require the other person to give you certain pieces of information about their word. Each card you use gives the other person victory points, however (as does incorrectly guessing their word). And the winner is the person who not only guesses their opponent's word, but concedes the fewest points doing it.

It's a quick and simple game, and we enjoyed it. Catherine also played a few rounds with Maya whilst I cooked Christmas dinner.

Our neighbour joined us for dinner, and we played a couple of games afterwards. The first was Kitttins, which is a very quick and simple game involving the stacking of cat meeples into shapes determined by a drawn card, and was another of Catherine's gifts. It's very much a dexterity game.

Here's a winning stack. You play a round until someone completes the pattern shown on the card. The first person to win three rounds wins the game.

That entertained us for a while, but we decided to get out something more cerebral, and opted for 'Rear Window'. Since our neighbour hadn't played before we left out the murder, so it was a simply a matter of me (the Director) leading the players to the correct solution with no subterfuge involved. They still failed to guess the correct occupant/attribute selections, though, although to be fair my inability to convey that the lady in Apartment D was an Athlete contributed to this.

So that was Christmas Day done with - our neighbour went home, we did two video calls to family in the UK and our son and his wife who are currently in Indonesia, and then went to bed.

Maya had asked to play the buddy-cop RPG Partners at some point over the holidays. This is designed for two players with no GM, but we decided to do it with three - Maya and Catherine would actually play and I would manage the mechanical side of things, tracking who led each scene, making notes and drawing cards and random words.

They created a detective series set in a shopping mall called the Sunnyview Retail Village, and called 'Village People' (the theme song was Village People's 'Hot Cop', naturally). Neither of their characters were actually official detectives - Catherine's straight shooter was a retail worker in a department store, whilst Maya's wild-card ran a cat-grooming service (yes, MORE cats) and operated MLMs on the side.

The mystery was the death of the mall's head of security, who was found drowned in the ornamental fountain in the main atrium. Naturally the police were investigating in the background, but we ignored that - our two intrepid amateur sleuths were also on the case and quickly uncovered a sordid network of affairs. However despite them looking to be the key to the murder, it actually turned out to be the victim's hairdresser who had killed them (albeit accidentally) with the motive being something to do with the upcoming prestigious 'Clippies' awards, and some illicit back-street hair-dressing operation that the security guard was threatening to expose.

And so onto the final game of the holiday - Scattles. Some friends of ours had recently been to Europe on a camping trip and had mentioned a game that involved throwing a baton at a group of skittles. Catherine tracked down a set (in the local Target, so not much detective work required) and bought it for me.

It's fun - we played for a good chunk of Boxing-Day evening (until the mosquitoes woke up)

The rules are simple. You throw a wooden baton at skittles set up about six feet away. They are numbered 1-12. If you knock down one skittle then you score its value. If you knock down multiple skittles then they are worth one point each. Knocked down skittles are stood up again, at the point where they ended up, so over time the targets get spread out. You win when you reach exactly 50 points. If you exceed 50 points then your score is reduced to 25 points and the game continues.

Sometimes our game was interrupted because of the appearance of (you've guessed it) a cat.

You can see how the skittles are getting spread out here.

Anyway, I think we all won at least one game.

Phew! So that was it for Christmas Day and Boxing Day for us. I added five new games to my 52 Games total for this year.

How did your days go?

52 Games - Game 71-75