Irregular Wars Wargaming

I introduced Lee to Andrea Sfiligoi's Of Gods and Mortals  last week with two games pitching a pack of hairies led by Thor, against my less hirsute Greeks. Initially Thor took on Hermes (out for his first game) and later he fought Athena. Once again, my camera(-phone) proved incapable of taking decent photos, although the fact I was shaking with man-flu may not have helped... So, to string together an ad hoc narrative to support the few grainy images: Thor had the same followers in both games - 8x berserkers, 8x skirmishing youths, and three valkyries. Hermes led a force consisting of 8x Thracians, 4x centaur archers, and 4x dryads, all supported by the minotaur, the hydra and the Kalydonian boar.  The Norsemen were all penned up behind the village to begin with. The berserkers and my Thracians kept snarling at each other, but neither managed enough activations to get close to each other for quite some time. This left the minotaur exposed in the middle of the two units...

Last month Kurt Bowker posted something pretty great on the  Ganesha Games/Song of Blades and Heroes Friendface page :  Gronk , a whale hunting version of  Palaeo Diet: Eat or Be Eaten . I have meant to share his ideas here for a couple of weeks now, but just haven't had a chance to post them up. In Kurt's own words: I had been playtesting my reskin of Ganesha Games "Paleo diet, kill or be eaten" (paleolithic hunting game) called 'Gronk!' about a year or so ago. Gronk is paleolithic or later tribal whale hunting. Skin boats and spears with wood floats. I had gotten 2 or 3 games in hunting just a whale with two boat crews. Taking notes. I had meant to start adding other sea creatures and work on the rules more but other things took up my time. Joe Knight has been wanting to playtest the rules himself so after our Roman Civil War game we set up a Gronk playtest. We had two rival islands, one Maori and one Melanesian sitting on opposite sides of a ...

One of several ideas I am currently tossing around for games is a Palaeo Diet derived game of stealth that, should it come to fruition, will ultimately be themed around Robin Hood (and similar outlaws) fighting against oppressive local authorities. I have a clutch of Normans and outlaws sitting on the shelf waiting on paint (and time, that most irrecuperable of concepts). In their absence, but with a few core mechanics nutted out, I sat down to play around with some Greek proxies.     This adventure took place in the ruins of a long abandoned temple somewhere in Thrace. Our heroes, Herakles and Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, start together on a grassy knoll in one corner of the table. They had been enjoying a quiet romp together before Herakles departed back to Argos. He'd been tasked with bringing back Hippolyta's girdle to present to King Agisthos to satisfy a girdle fetish. The Amazon found the whole idea so humorous that she was glad to oblige....