Flytrap Factory prehistoric fun

My small order from Flytrap Factory arrived yesterday having sat in HM's Customs for far too long. I have to say that I am absolutely delighted with them. I bought one pack of five prehistoric hunters (one-piece white metal castings) and three mammoths (resin with white metal tusks). Despite being very busy with work, I immediately stuck them on magnetised bases awaiting an undercoat (of which I am temporarily out).

As you can see, all sculpts are unique and conform to a fun, exaggerated style. The chap on the right of the lower picture there comes with a full length spear but I 'amended' it ahead of converting his spear into a flaming torch. These first release cavemen are about 20mm to the tops of their heavy-browed heads.

The mammoth pack also comes with three unique sculpts and two different tusk shapes so there is potential for a fair bit of variation in your herd. They come to about 40mm to the top of the hump.

Now, I love these chaps, and they are destined to be used for Ganesha Games' Song of Blades and Heroes and for Wessex Games' Tusk mammoth hunting game. However, it is understandable that for some people, 20mm cavies and creatures might not be their preferred scale. Realising this, Flytrap Factory have developed a whole expansion of the range bringing the scale up to 28mm. Within the new scheme, the original hunters become pygmies, and the mammoths become mammoth calves.

The company is only a small outfit and they have launched a Kickstarter to help produce the new parts of the range. If you havn't already seen it, I would really encourage you to have a look at the campaign. There are 12 days left and and they need another $1,500 to make the project a success.

Part of the Kickstarter will be a set of rules to go with the range called Caveman verse Wild: The Big Chill. These look like a really fun approach to the trials and tribulations of survival for Ice Age hunters. From what I gather, the hunters are actively run by players co-cooperatively or competitively, while creatures and environmental dangers are controlled by an AI system.

The aim of the game seems to be to feed your tribe by hunting prey. However, whenever hunters come within a trigger distance of a terrain piece they roll against their 'wit' to see whether they get ambushed by deadly predators. Furthermore, there are AI controlled squirrel-rats which act as 'portents'. Should a squirrel-rat come withing trigger range of a hunter, all manner of cataclysms and calamities can be unleashed from volcanoes and floods to meteor strikes. It really does look like a great deal of fun. So go ahead, check out the Kickstarter, support it. Think of it as a charitable donation. It is a Kiwi company after all and (spoken as an Australian) they need as much help to be noticed as possible... ;)