"Picking the collective brain" Topic

All,
Finished reading Quest for Fire yesterday. I'm wondering about setting up a different sort of game. Everything I normally play is done on 3x3 mats. Has anyone ever tried gaming a journey?

There have been several successful "Retreat From Moscow 1812" games, where the French column remains stationary in the center of the table and the terrain scrolls past to either side. Enemies appear in front (usually) or to the rear (sometimes). "Road Warrior – Get the Rig with the Juice" games are often run the same way.

The TwoHourWargames campaign system usually works as a battle (played on the table), followed by a short narrative "and the traveled to …", which leads to another battle.

The battles might be a meet & greet to get clues/connections/jobs and might go well, or poorly, which affect the next 'battle'.

You might make a list of possible encounters (meet a predator, meet prey, find shelter, find water, meet another tribe, etc). Throw in some challenges (bad weather, impassable terrain, wild fire, etc) with some potentially bad effects to overcome (or affect the type of encounter next).

IE: 1st encounter=meet a predator. If you win, you get +food and next mission is to find water; if you lose, get -food or injury and next mission is to find shelter.

I thought about that, maybe numbered grids that would reveal either predators, prey, hostile hominids or nothing.

That would be my thought as well. Hexes or tiles that are flipped over when you enter them.

You can paint up Harbor Freight, or similar, floor mat sections (cut off the interlocking portions, so they butt against one another, more smoothly), sliding them down the table, to create room for the next piece of terrain, as the miniatures progress across them, to simulate their movement.

The foam floor tiles take craft paint exceptionally well: large, 2.75D wooden fort setup; cavern setup (D&D's Green Dragons breathe Chlorine Gas, not fire); foam mats as a glacial/snow floor (Humans versus Frost Giants; these were Chinese knock-off mats, factory painted yellow; I painted them with white latex paint/emulsion -- the latex paint flaked off, after a couple of years). Acrylic craft paint has not flaked off of the Harbor Freight mats, running 5+ years. The HF mats have a smooth surface on their bottom side, and this takes craft paint remarkably well, appearing to be exceptionally durable for gaming purposes.

If you need a crosshatch pattern, such as a 1-inch grid, you can cut this into the foam mats using a fine-tooth blade in a Table Saw; set the depth to no more than 1/4-inch, or 6 mm, to avoid the mats tearing apart with handling. This is what I did, to allow me to slot into them, 2D wall sections, as shown in some of the photos, above.

The foam mat sections are 25 inches by 25 inches/63.5 cm by 63.5 cm, and 1/2-inch/12 mm thick. They are easy to paint up for terrain, using a natural sponge, and 3-5 colors, appropriate to the terrain type you wish to create, using a wet blending technique. Use the zoom feature of the photos, above, to better see how the sponge painting looks, up close; painting was done after the grid pattern was cut into the mat sections. They are super-simple, super-easy, super-effective, to paint, and to use as a flat terrain base, IMO. Cheers!

The idea worked well enough, up the journey only lasted five turns! The group ran into a hostile band of Neanderthal who beat them up,badly.

Well, they had a good run. Maybe their kids will have a better time of it.

I am working on a simple terrain generator that I will use in such "travel" games. It involves dividing the playing area into 1" , 1" squares and rolling dice against a chart. It will work to give the player realistic options. Streams drain into larger bodies of water. A hill might lead to more hills. Bodes of water will have vegetation on the banks. Low areas will tend to be wet in Spring and Autumn, and drier in Summer. Open steppe will be arid in Summer but frozen in Winter. Fresh water sources will be hazardous due to visits from rival hominids and megafauba. "Peaceful" herbivores will attract carnivores.