Cavemen, Nazis and Saucers Oh My!

We had our local convention last weekend, Conquest Sac, at which I ran a couple of games.


Caveman!

First off was Pulp Action Library's Caveman game, a very fun, quick & simple game about prehistoric warfare. The things that sold me on this game were:

• Players actually threw "rocks" at the other players (not the figures) to see if they hit with their missiles.
• Combat is determined by rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissor (originally Cavemen played Rock, Rock, Rock, but that lacked the sophistication to provide a suitable resolution for the wargame rules).
• The only "dice" used in the game are flat rocks with red goo on one side & black goo on the other. Red is good, black is bad, since it's better to be red than dead.
• The players are expected to actually dance & chant to get the favor of the Gods (GM), & only communicate in grunts & hand gestures.

3 people played the game. I called them Lar, Atouk & Gog since they couldn't talk. This is the board laid out. Each tribe of cavemen came in from one of the corners, with the objective of getting food.


The food is a family of mammoths, with a saber tooth tiger stalking them in the bushes.


A few pictures of the different tribes.


They are the Tim Mee 1/48 scale plastic cavemen that you can still get on Amazon.


& these are the tools of the game: magic yellow totems used by the tribe's shaman, "rocks" for throwing made out of foam, & cave "dice". The caveman on the right is the shaman since his blonde hair is obviously magical.


The tribe converge on the Mammoth family...


The Mammoths scattered, but the cavemen quickly realized ganging up on the Mammoths is the way to go.


One tribe killed & drug off the saber tooth tiger, but another tribe finally killed one of the Mammoths, winning the game.



Eat Hitler

The 2nd game was another by Pulp Action Library, Eat Hitler. In 1945, Hitler & his senior staff try to travel back to 1939 to do it right the 2nd time. But they have a faulty ocillation overthruster & instead travel back to the Jurassic era (which looks strangely like the Paleolithic era where the Cavemen live).


In the game, you play dinosaurs trying to get through the crunchy Nazi shell to the soft chewy Hitler center. There are dinos from T Rex down to Raptors & Pterodactyls. The players also move the Nazis & herbivore dinosaurs to either get them in the way of the other players, or move them out of the way of their own dinos.


We had players from 6 yrs old, on up, & all had fun.


First on the officer buffet was Himmler with all the Raptors joining in.


The Pterodactyls gobbled up a trooper before confronting Hitler. But once they finally grabbed him to take him back to their aerie, the Raptor player used his Nazi activation to shoot the Pterodactyl & make him drop Hitler.


Then the Allosaurus gobbled Hitler up before the other 2 could move again.


You can barely see Hitler throwing his Heil Nazi gang sign before greasing the Allosaurus' gullet.


& here is the final count for the Pterodactyl's larder to feed their young.


The Allosaurus won since he ate both Hitler & Goering, & immediately went to the Dinosaur Emergency Room with severe stomach pains.


DUST Rumble in the Jungle

The final game was a joint effort by my local club. I was one of the assistant GMs & helped a bit on the terrain.


We played a big game of DUST Warfare simplified for the convention. For those not familiar with the DUST family of Weird World War 2 games, it's the 1950s & WW2 is still going, but with alien and advanced technology. The game includes rocket jump packs, zombies & gorilla troops, plus a variety of walkers.


Our game centered around an alien flying saucer that crashed into the African jungle (& there also happened to be dinosaurs in the area).


The saucer was built by one of our club members. He used 2 plastic snow saucers, & put flickering LED tea lights the smoke to make it look like it was on fire.


He even put bits & pieces inside the saucer to make it look completely alien.


Allied rocket troops fight with Axis gorillas over control of the saucer, with the rest of the troops try to pick up the alien debris scattered behind the crash.


We ran 2 games for 10 players each & both went well. We'll be running the game again at Kublacon & Pacificon if you're interested in trying it.

Church of the ???

A few posts ago, I showed a church I had scratch built for Stange Aeons. I have now pretty much completed painting it up.

Instead of a steeple to hold some sort of emblem, I'm planning on painting a symbol on the wooden planks across the apex of the roof. I just haven't decided what to paint yet.


I know I was a bit heavy handed with the brown wash under the windows on this side.


Yep, that's the back of a building.


The mossy stuff on the roof & growing up the building is Underbrush from Woodland Scenics. Mason from Lead Adventure Forums used it on one of his buildings as ivy growth & I really liked it. It's a great way to make small growth in corners & around buildings.


The inside turned out a lot yellower than I intended, I was trying for a pine look. The side walls are plastic sheet, & the brush marks left in the paint ended up making it look a little like wood grain after I applied a brown wash.


Father Edmund can get a little messy some times.


& a quick shot of the steps down to the larder.


The interior dimensions of the building are pretty small, so I don't expect to do any actual gaming inside the church. But I'm very happy with how it come out, being my 1st attempt at a major scratch building project. I'm thinking there still needs to be some sort of symbol or mystic circle on the floor or wall behind the altar to finish the whole thing off.

I must say Skrapwelder helped out a lot. He gave me the resin roof & a lot of advice during the whole process.

Strange Aeons: Catch and Release

Continuing with the Strange Aeon's campaign for Skrapwelder's Threshold Agents, I ran him through another 2 games.

In the 1st game, his Agents were following some clues found at the Moonwineshine still. The clues took them to another backwoods shanty town that seemed to be the main collection point for the wine.

Unfortunately, the shiners got the drop on them. The Agents were able to take out a few, including their zombie dog.

But the Agents were all taken down & captured by the shiners.


In the 2nd game, the Agents woke up in some sort of industrial building.

The Lurkers were in the main warehouse preparing their stock for another shipment.

The Agents were tied up in the rooms in the smaller warehouse. They were able to escape their bonds & find their weapons.

The lead Agent quietly observed the activity in the main warehouse and came up with a plan.

Quickly sharing it with the rest of the Agents, they would shoot their way through the Lurkers & search the office in the main warehouse to find any accounting books or other incriminating evidence.

The Agents were surprised to see they were confronted both by humans but also GUSTs again (Group of Unknown Scuttley Things).

The Agents did take a few casualties, but they were able to finally bring both the humans & the GUSTs down, achieving their goal. & just to add a cinematic ending, a truck full of G-Men came busting through the warehouse doors.

Unfortunately, they didn't find any useful evidence to further their investigation, but all the Agents fully recovered.

In case you're interested, the buildings are from the Virtual Armchair General's Mean Street/Mean Sets range. The sets are not like normal paper buildings, but are designed to be wrapped around 1/4" foam core to give more solidity to the walls. I put the peel & stick business card magnets on the end of the walls, so the whole structure collapsable. Here is a prior post I made about my construting the buildings.

Nightmare on 34th St

For our next game of Strange Aeons, I ran the Nightmare on 34th St holiday theme scenario. The scenario rules can be found here. Basically, an evil Santa is trying to grab kids before the Threshold Agents can rescue them.

Here's the main Lurker figures in the Christmas posse: the Elves, Santa & Rudolph.

Santa is the Horrorclix Jester figure in a padded putty suit.

The Elves were the Cannibal Clowns, also from Horrorclix, with a bit of repaint. Rudolph is Skrapwelder's & from AE WW2.

Here are the sugar drunk troublemakers that the Agents are supposed to rescue.

A picture of the overall board

& one from the Lurker's side.

There wasn't much to the the game though. Since the scenario required Santa be a 7 pt Maniac, & I had 16 pts with which to buy Lurkers, I bought a bunch of 1 pt Cultists to bulk out Lurker forces. This meant the Lurker gang didn't have any commander figure. So, while all 4 of the Threshold Agents were activating at a time & rescuing the kids, only 1 Lurker could activate, which made it almost impossible to chase down the Agents or kids.

Santa was able to cut down Officer "Just Arriving on the Scene", but the head Agent then took out Santa during melee. I should have forced all the kids on to make a Resolve check after seeing their rescuers slaughter Santa, but I didn't.

The Threshold was able to rescue all the kids, only for the loss of the Police office. Overall, a quick but fun game. & now I've got the Santa figure ready for next year. I just have to find some more of those Elves.

Escape from Witch Mountain

We played our 2nd Strange Aeons game a few weeks ago. This time, we did just a 1-on-1 game & it went a lot better than the larger game last time.

We rolled up the Escape scenario where the Threshold agents have to make it across the board. I wanted the game to follow on from the end of the last game to continue the storyline. So the Theshold gang were trying to return from investigating the ritual circle they discovered last time.

But the County Sherriffs were in the pay of the Moonshiners. And since the agents had just busted up the Moonshiners, the Sherriffs decided to mosey on over to make sure the Threshold gang didn't make it out of the back woods alive.

We also used the Twisted Fate deck for the games. It certainly added some big cinematic moments to the game. At 1st it seemed like drawing a card every turn would be too much, but having more cards to use in defense definately helped. It did seem suspicious that my opponent Skrapwelder, who printed up the cards, was the only one who got the "out of ammo" card. & that really hurt when he played it on my Lurker with the Tommy Gun.


Game 1

The 1st game had Skrapwelder running his new Threshold gang against my Sheriffs. & you know Sheriffs always have to have a bloodhound with them, so they brought a Zombie Dog.

Skrapwelder's Threshold character, Murphy, the Old Groundskeeper

The rest of his gang: Betty Joe Bialowski, Jack MacAdam, & Officer "Just arrived on the scene"

The Threshold agents left the ritual circle after they completed their investigations, but were quickly spotted by one of the Lurker Sheriffs.

"Hey Sarge! I can see those damn Carpet Baggers from up here. They're just leaving the Ol' Jed's nekkid dancin' spot."

The Sergeant let loose his prize hound, Bubba. Which quickly tracked down and tore up Office "No longer appearing in this film"

Bubba was gunned down after that.

Betty Joe then gave good evidence as to why she had been scouted by the local All Women's Baseball team. She quickly struck down 2 Sheriffs with her bat.

This was one of the more fun cinematic moments caused by the Twisted Fate deck. The Lurker Sheriff had no melee weapon, so had to face Betty & her bat unopposed. Luckily he survived her 1st swing. Then Skrapwelder played on Betty the Divine Intervention card (immune to all damage) & Killing Blow card (+2 close combat). I then played Bad Luck (cancelling Betty's immunity) & my own Divine Intervention. So, even though Betty had a +2, she effectively couldn't use it. & the Sheriff at least had a chance to do some damage to her, which he didn't. She quickly beat the Sheriff down. That was all her 1st action in her turn.

She then activated her Heroic skill allowing 3 actions her turn, with which she ran up behind another another Sheriff & beat him down in 1 blow. So in 1 turn, she just about took out half my Lurker gang, earning her the nickname of Bludgeoning Betty.

With the immediate Lurker threat dispatched the agents quickly tried to high-tail it off the board. Unfortunately, the remaining Sheriffs' marksmanship took a heavy toll, gunning down both Jack & Betty as they ran off.

Here Murphy stops for a quick forelorn glance at his collegues shot in the back before escaping to safety.

Game 2A

We then reversed roles and I ran the Threshold gang from the our 1st game a few weeks ago through the same scenario.

Skrapwelder based his Lurkers around an 11 point Maniac. He gave the Maniac the Sneak skill, which put him within 1 move of the Threshold on the 1st turn.

"Peek-a-boo!"

The Professor went down 1st. Then, after watching the Maniac slaugther her father, his daugther blasted him with her shotgun for 1 point of damage. But the Maniac tore through everyone else so fast the game was over in about 15 minutes. The other 2 Lurkers never even moved.

Game 2B

We decided to run the game again, but this time Skrapwelder came up with another set of Lurkers, 2 Deep Ones & 2 regular Cultists. Luckily, he kind of forgot the objective was for the Threshold to get off the other side of the board. So he was momentarily surprised when my agents just kept running past the Lurkers.

& yet again, the Reporter accompanying Threshold was caught & savaged, this time by a Deep One.

I think the local paper is going to stop sending Reporters on these expeditions (or I'm going to have to get a bigger variety of figures to denote Civilians).

My agents quickly outpaced the flopping Deep Ones.

"Hurry up, Professor!"

& rushed off the board.

"Come on Dad! Just through these trees & we should be back at the Wardrobe."

& here is our Strange Aeons mascot. Skrapwelder's wife found it somewhere. So now whenever a figure dies in the game, we squeeze this little guy to make him utter a hideous shreik while his his eyes flash red.

Overall, we both enjoyed the games, & will be planning another one soon. We will probably be having the 2 campaigns diverge from each other, so we can develop in secret our own nefarious & dastardly plans for the other's agents.