Irregular Wars Wargaming

To finish this year’s Palaeo Diet season, Mark used the Pulp variant of the rules to play a game of skulduggery, as the black hand of the Russian regime - the Okhrana secret police - tries to capture V I Lenin who is resting up at a German army camp at Bialystok on his way to the Finland Station. So, it’s April 1917 and Lenin is being conveyed by the German High Command from his exile in Switzerland, back to Russia where they hope he will further destabilise the tottering Provisional government. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Here’s an overhead view of a small German army camp outside the town of Bialystok. In Lithuania if you’re a patriot or in Poland if you’re not. It’s the dead of night … (Photo #1). The camp is guarded by a detachment of six men (Goons, commanded by Sgt Ostmann, all armed with smg). A snatch squad of five Okhrana men (Adventurers, commanded by special agent Malinovsky, all armed with pistols) will try to infiltrate, grab Lenin, and escape with him (Photo...

In a rare alignment of the stars, I have been working on a very simple game through work: Mountsandal , a game of hunting and gathering for 1-6 players. This game has been created to help engage Key Stage II and III pupils (8-13 year olds) with the history of Ireland’s first people. It was developed under the auspices of Causeway Coast and Glens Museum Service as part of The Royal Society’s Places of Science programme. In Mountsandel , players take on the role of Mesolithic people struggling to survive in Ireland almost 10,000 years ago. Living in the Middle Stone Age, at a time before farming or permanent homes, the Mesolithic people moved between different camps at different times of the year depending on what food they could hunt or gather. This game is named after the local archaeological site of Mountsandel, on the River Bann near the modern town of Coleraine. Mountsandel is the site of the earliest known settlement on the island of Ireland, dating back to around 7,...

Mark's last Paleao-month dispatch using his own underwater adaptation of Palaeo Diet: Pulp . This adventure from the Mesozoic time-travel world of the Utterley-Barkinge Company (NL) takes us back to the early Jurassic , about 100 MYA. It uses the “Predator” scenario suggestion in the PDEE rules for a bit of role reversal. This time the human hunters are the hunted, and the usual beasts (in this case, Squid, Ichthyosaurs, and others) are the hunters. A party of six time travel tourists, including their guide, is on a walking tour through a spectacular canyon on the floor of the Mid-Atlantic Rift. Four of them are armed with spear guns (spears) and two with glaives (clubs). Those armed with spearguns will close to shooting range and shoot, when they get an Attack reaction, if possible. Here’s a group photo of the tour group, taken as they started out on their trek. From L-R: Vlad Putin, Donald Trump, Bashir Al-Assad (spearguns); Kim Jong-un, Binyamin Netanyahu (glaives). And on the f...

Mark continues his Palaeo Diet month with another Pulp game: We last met this dodgy outfit back in January 2021 when they pulled off a smash & grab raid on the priceless artefacts of Tel el Pattaya. Now they are back, with different “archaeologists”, to survey the ancient Mayan ruins of Nongprue in deepest Central America.  Here is the team who will be undertaking this absolutely above-board and fully approved work - Front row L-R: Lara Garrod (who is a Naturalist), Angelina Kenyon (Occultist), and Lyra Belacqua (Addict), the Adventurers. Behind them, some local “Hounds” they have hired as troubleshooters. “It’s just an expression snowflakes”, says Angelina, the Adventurers’ leader. “Get over it. They’re all called Pablo, or Sanchez, something like that.” She added “it’s not like they are Goons or anything.” The adventurers and hired help are all are equipped WYSIWYG.  And here is the trouble they may need to shoot - In the rear, some Giant Armadillos with thagomisers, sp...

The adventure concludes … (if you missed part 1, click HERE , or part 2, click HERE ) Some months later … the information provided by the Mayan inscription (as photographed and drawn by expedition members in the Amazon) has been instrumental in defeating the plans of some bad actors, using Dr Muller’s research, to control the weather. Details need not concern us now. But professor Logarithm continued to puzzle over the rest of the inscription, especially some rows of glyphs at the bottom. Then late last month he addressed a meeting of the Society to announce his findings.  The bottom of the inscription although incomplete describes the journey of the Heavenly Twins (Mayan semi-divine humans, a bit like Hercules or Maui) into the abode of the Gods, where they performed valorous deeds but eventually were killed by the jealous deities. So far it’s normal ethnological stuff. A lot of cultures have legends like this. But then, the inscription seems to state that the gateway or portal th...