The Lost World wargame

 

Some years ago I bought some dinosaurs from Poundland. I did not have a use for them as such but I thought they would come in useful. They were big impressive models, already painted, and yes you guessed it, only a pound each.

You can easily by bags of cheap dinos in bargain shops, toy shops or on eBay.

Recently I came across the excellent Tusk rules and they inspired me to dig my dinos out from the back of the garage and use them for a game.

The Tusk rules enable you to play two different types of games – one is stone age men hunting dinos for meat, the other is a Lost World scenario as in the book by Conan Doyle.

https://www.wargamevault.com/product/64533/Tusk

Whats great about the system is its unpredictability – different dinos will behave in different ways according to circumstances, and the behavior of each species can vary from turn to turn. This creates an unpredictable and fun game.

So the scenario was – at the end of the `109^th century, rumors have reached Europe of a lost valley where dinosaurs still rule the earth. Expeditions from two rival powers have set out to find out the truth and capture specimens if possible.

As usual for any wacky game, my partner was Ed. I took the British team and he took the Belgians. Each team started from either end of a 6 x 5 table. Their objective was to capture as many of the baby dinos wandering in the middle of the table as possible then exit the table.

We each had a mix of heroes, Europeans and askaris. I amended the Tusk rules to give them all different characteristics and also to increase the different types of dinosaurs.

My plan was to keep my unit together – I took some early casualties from a marauding Tyrannosaurus, but concentrated firepower quicky brought him down.

Carefully we moved past the tribe of pygmies towards the wandering baby dinos. I do have some pygmies somewhere but could not find them so we have to make do with night goblins.

At the other end of the table Ed had split into 2 teams to cover more ground. One of these was soon in trouble due to attacks from Sabre tooths and a ptetradactyl. Ha, ha ha!

As his other team moved towards the objective, the local tribesmen ventured out of their village and treated him to a deadly volley of missiles. Ha, ha, ha, again!

I was feeling pretty confident at this point, I have only lost a couple of men and Ed had big problems with the local wildlife and the tribesmen.

But then the randomness of the rules took a hand.

The tribesmen were set upon by 3 dinosaurs in succession who made mincemeat of them and Ed was able to quickly capture 2 baby dinos. My team moved up to capture the other 2, but we were then attacked by a very grumpy triceratops.

As both teams now had 2 dinos each, shots were exchanged as the British tried to capture one of the Belgian baby dino captives. Two of my askaris panicked (failed their morale test) and fled the triceratops only to bang their head on an overhanging branch to fall senseless to the ground where they were finished off by the ruthless Belgians!

We had a rule that double moving through the jungle is dangerous, which includes panic flight as a result of failing a morale test, so on a roll of 1 on a D6 the runner has fallen into a spiked pit, on a 2 they hit their head on a branch. The askaris both rolled 2s!!!

The British finally despatched the triceratops but the Belgians were winning the firefight, and the British were torn between trying to keep hold of the captive dinos and returning fire.

The Belgians headed for their exit point with 2 baby dinos and the British decided to do likewise.

Unfortunately at this point the pygmies, who hitherto had been content to just watch proceedings, decided to intervene by attacking the British who were still taking fire from the Belgians.

A deadly volley of missiles felled most of the remaining Brits, and as it was only 1 British model that escaped with a baby dino trophy, while the Belgians made off with 2 baby dinos and 4 models left – victory to the Belgians.

It was a very entertaining game. The random movement and behavior of the dinosaurs really made it, and the fact that each dinosaur has its own characteristics added to the fun. I did not have to buy any figures for this game, I used heroes from my Cthulhu collection plus some colonial figures, the Belgian regulars are World War One Turks given white uniforms. I made the huts for the game which are cardboard. We assumed that the whole of the board was covered with jungle so firing ranges were restricted to 12 inches.

We firmly resolved to do another dinosaur game soon. So pick up a copy of Tusk, and a bag of dinos and give it a go.