Mountsandel: A game of hunting and gathering for 1-6 players
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 fist 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 7,800 BC.
The rules were written to fit entirely on one double-sided A4 page, or a single side of an A3 page using randomised turn order and risk/reward decisions driving co-operative play as the members of a tribe seek to hunt and/or gather enough food in six turns to feed them as they move onto the next campsite.
Written to be understood by younger players and picked up quickly, they are not particularly sophisticated, but they did seem very popular during the two summer schemes that Museum Services ran this year.
The rules are available as a free pdf download from the Northern Ireland Community Archive - www.niarchive.org.
We printed out a 2'x2' (60x60cm) playing area and the tokens provided with the rules sheet, and used cabochons to make the tokens more robust for little hands. Otherwise, it's just a matter of having a ruler and some dice of different colours handy.