Hey! Watch where you put that Tusk!

I had my first game using Wessex Games' mammoth hunting rules Tusk this week, or rather, the wee lad played his first ever wargame this week - he played Tusk with me attempting to guide the game.

The game has great potential, and was (almost) easy enough for an (almost) six year old to follow without too much trouble. However... I'm not convinced that the layout of the pdf version of the rules (from Wargame Vault) does the game any favours. There are certainly a few areas that could be written more clearly - the whole fire section for instance. I'm not sure we 'did' fire properly in our game and ended up with quite a conflagration in one corner of the board for a while.

I'm honestly not sure whether a single page QRS would solve the few issues, or if it is best just to play house rules/understandings. Having a little bit of experience crafting rules now, it was a struggle to stop my mind racing off thinking about how I might do things differently...

Regardless, we both had great fun and he tells me he wants to play it again. The fact that he lost two of his five hunters to the angry mammoth didn't seem to bother him, and he did eventually kill the beastie, which made him happy. Mammoth kebabs for a month for the remaining hunters!

Incidentally, this is how I am doing my scorched earth markers - well, how I am starting them anyway. The bases are 25mm squares with rounded edges. The sand will be blackened eventually with some dry grass around the edges. I'm using cotton wool smoke to mark live fires and taking it away when the fires go out.