A few days ago, I posted looking for information about Steve Barber’s Prehistoric Settlement game. It arrived in the mail yesterday, so, since some other folks appeared interested as well, I thought I’d do a quick review of the package.
First, what’s in the box? The game contains: 1 game rule book, food tokens, flint tokens, wound tokens, building placement cards 4 six-sided dice, 6 berry bushes, 4 flint mines, 1 neolithic temple, 1 burial mound, 2 warriors' camps, 2 food stores, 4 tents, 6 deer, 1 woolly mammoth, 1 saber-tooth tiger, 2 chieftains, 4 berry pickers, 4 builders, 4 flint miners, 4 clubmen, 4 spearmen, 4 archers. There is exactly enough in the box for two players to have a game. The rules allow two tribesmen of each type for each player, but there is a note that tribal sizes can be increased.
All of the creature figures are metal except for the mammoth which is resin. And all of the buildings are resin. The figures appear to be Cro-Magnon and match in height exactly with Pulp Figures’ Neanderthals, although the Neanderthals are a bit more chunky. The deer are small, about the size of largish dogs, and the saber-tooth tiger is smaller than I expected too. But the quality is great – little or no flash, well-detailed, few if any mold lines, and the cast-on bases require no modification, although I’ll still probably mount mine on fender washers. The resin pieces are quite well done too although the temple is a bit brittle. I’d recommend that it be glued to a plasticard base, but all the others will be fine free-standing. But the detail is, again, very good and, of course, they’re exactly in scale with the human figures. Note that all of these pieces (figures and buildings) can be purchased separately, and you’d need to separately buy some of the specialty figures (like ax-men) that don’t come in the boxed set, although the rules cover them. But, the price for all the figures individually exceeds the cost of the boxed set which also includes the rules and counters that go along with the game, making the boxed set a great deal.
The paper products include the game book, a sheet of tokens, a sheet of cards, and a quick reference sheet. The latter two are on heavy card stock and serviceable but I suspect they won’t last very long unless you put them into sheet protectors or laminate them. The sheet of tokens contains counters to keep track of the resources of your tribe. It is on glossy card stock and appears more durable than the other sheets. The rules themselves are contained in a 30-page booklet, each page being 5”x8”, and having an inch margin at the bottom and an inch-and-a-half header at the top (so the actual rules are very short). The cover is a color picture of a hand-drawn volcano and the interior is all black-and-white. There are illustrations, for identification purposes, of each of the figures, animals, and buildings. The rules are straight-forward, clear, and simple. In the entire booklet, only one typo jumped out at me.
How to play: First, I’m not sure I’d classify this as a wargame, although combat is a part of it. It is much more oriented around construction. Combat becomes a part of the game during the hunt, when raiding enemy settlements, and when protecting one’s own settlement. Each player deploys in a 2’x2’ square, one square per player. It really is a 2- or 4-player game because of this. In a 3-player version, one would be sandwiched in between the other two and overwhelmed fairly quickly. Each player starts with only four figures. The object is to use those four to start building things right away. Each type of building allows certain types of activities. For example, you must have a tent before you can create new tribe members; you must have a warrior camp before you can build the most effective warriors (archers and ax-men). The game ends when a player constructs a temple or a burial mound.
The sequence of play is IGOUGO, but for some reason, that doesn’t bother me like it usually does. It seems right, in this case. The game turn is broken down into eight steps. The first is to determine initiative (the order in which the players execute the coming turn). The player who wins initiative also has a chance of having random events occur. These can be natural disasters (1 chance in 36) or random appearances of new animals or discovering new “things”, like more flint mines (5 chances in 36). The player then collects natural resources if he has the appropriate civilians to do so (this would be the “gathering” half of “hunter-gatherer” societies). The player then builds new buildings. In this case, a card is placed at the site where the building will go; the card shows the number of turns it takes a builder to build that building. A player may only have only one building under construction at a time. Then, any completed buildings are placed, at the location of their card. This means that if I finish a building on Turn 2, I won’t be able to start the next one until Turn 3. Animal figures in the player’s territory (2’x2’ section) are moved (there a single page of rules that describe how animals are moved randomly). Then the player moves his own tribesmen figures. Any Missile combat is resolved (the “hunting” half of “hunter-gatherer”), then Melee combat is resolved. After each type of combat, if food can be collected from a kill, it is. The other players then take it in turns to do the same steps.
Combat is about as simple as you can get. Each figure has a “stat” line (although the book doesn’t depict it that way). It consists of a move rate, close combat factor, missile combat factor, wounds caused, wounds to be killed (GW gamers can think of M, WS, BS, W, and weapon damage). All figures can fight, including civilians. Melee combat consists of getting adjacent to an enemy, and rolling a single D6. If the result is less than or equal to the figure’s close combat factor, he inflicts a wound. Most figures can only take one wound before dying. Missile combat works exactly the same way, except at range, and can be done with bows or thrown spears. The number of modifiers to combat is minimal – five for close combat, four for missile combat. A very, very simple system, it reminds me of a free set of rules called Neolithic. However, there is room for complexity. Correct positioning of the figures is important; even more important is allocating those figures – how many go hunting, how many defend the settlement, how many go on a raid? I think that combat probably isn’t a factor in the game until at least Turn 4, which is when the minimum required buildings will have been completed. And there is a trade-off between high-quality fighters and low-quality ones. The latter allows you to do more things; the former allows you to do one thing but do it well.
I haven’t played yet; it will take a while to get the pieces all painted. But it looks very much like a challenging yet simple, fast-playing game. It will be challenging from the point of view of allocating effort in the right direction at the right time; perhaps this really is a wargame but focuses on the truly important thing in war – logistics. And there are subtleties hidden in very, very simple rules. Take the following example. The booklet lists six different tribes (kind of pointless, really, since tribal differences don’t make any difference to the stat line). However, each tribe must build specifically a temple, or specifically a burial mound to win. The player doesn’t get a choice as to which. So, if both players have to build a temple, there will be an automatic conflict – there is only one temple building card. So the player who started building it first gets the card. The other player has no choice but to raid the first player at some point and kill the builder, thereby destroying the unbuilt temple and allowing him to start building. Daunting at first glance, but then, it takes a long time to build a temple, the temple builder cannot be building any other structures during that time, the second player can build more tents and warriors camps, and therefore more troops. So the raid has a good chance of success. In other words, it isn’t even remotely likely that a player will win by starting to building his temple on Turn 4. He has to already have the economic and military infrastructure to permit that to be done safely.
The last thing that is particularly striking is the replay value. This is one of those games where, because of initial deployments, random events and appearances, the situation will be different for each game. A player may find himself resource-rich in one game, and on the verge of starvation in another. Oh, and there are no dinosaurs!
There are two follow-on supplements – The Savage Seas, and Out of the Wilderness. I don’t have those and so cannot speak directly to them. However, based on what I’ve seen from the basic set, I plan on ordering both in the very near future. I’d rate the game as a strong B+ (B for the figures, C for the paper products, A+ for playability). If you have a significant other or a child who are even remotely interested in your hobby, this may be the ticket that gets them in – it is easily comprehensible, will play quickly, and looks like a hoot to play. And it something that I'm going to play again and again.
