Pangolin – I

While I took some time off work this week, rest has been a little hard to come by as my dog has had diarrhea for almost a week now. She seemed to be getting better mid-week and there was about two days there where things were pretty normal but she’s taken a step back since yesterday much to the chagrin of my wife and I. Fingers crossed that she gets better soon and we all get some rest. I can certainly confirm that I’m tired as I attempt to write this week’s update…

Hobbywise, I mostly worked on the project I teased last week. With Dave Stone’s sculpting acumen, I’m working on painting a gigantic “miniature” pangolin. I put that in quotations because this sculpt is not too far off from life-size! The pangolin is 12 inches long so it is by far the largest thing I’ve ever painted. I will save the explanation for why I’m painting this particular creature for a future update but for now, its coming along alright. When Dave and I originally planned this project, I requested that we mount the pangolin on the tree (since some species are arboreal) but after giving it some thought and looking for a base at Michael’s (a ubiquitous craft store in the US), I decided to place it on the ground instead. Fortunately, I have some slate rocks left over from LOTR terrain so I used those to spruce up the base. The paint job looks a bit gaudy right now but I’m going to try and make it look nicer and more realistic as I go. Its going to take a bit to get all of the scales painted though as you can probably tell so it will be interesting to see how much progress I can show next week.

My original plan for this update was to have a Prehistoric battle report for you but unfortunately, I gave Palaeo Diet: Eat or Be Eaten a try and didn’t have a great time with it. Let me try to explain a bit about why it wasn’t enjoyable. The scenario I played is called Vanilla Skies and is clearly meant to be an introductory one. Four hunters face off against a woolly mammoth. You win if you kill it and lose if a certain amount of the hunters die. Sounds pretty simple and it was.

The problem is that as I played I quickly realized that the strategy of Palaeo Diet is very limited. Your hunters can be equipped with a club (which is melee only and gets a slight bonus), a spear (which has a range of about 3 inches), and you can use a bow and arrow at a longer range which is the weakest weapon of these three. Perhaps Fallout has spoiled me with lots of interesting weapons but these led to fairly limited tactical options.

Palaeo Diet uses a reaction system where the animals you’re hunting respond to you in different situations. Otherwise, they stay put. The animals tend to react when things are dangerous like when you’re wielding fire, your pet hound is pursuing them, and that sort of thing. In this scenario there is one situation where the woolly mammoth will react and that is if your hunters get within short distance which is spear throwing range or in base contact to try and club them. That means you spend a fair bit of time chasing after the mammoth who flees fairly often depending on what dice result you get (roughly 50% of the time). In my game, it fled quite often and I started hoping that it would roll to charge and attack me which is not realistic or ideal. The game felt like a cat and mouse game the entire time and the mouse was winning as much as I was. The mammoth’s behavior wasn’t all that interesting or fun to hunt. Some animals act differently, like the apex predator which is more likely to attack or to try and eat anything that is killed near them but overall, that is pretty much it. I also felt like the reactions slowed the flow of the game down a bit and it didn’t flow as much as I hoped or expected.

Something that didn’t dawn on me until I tried playing Palaeo Diet is that there isn’t all that many outcomes that can happen from hunting. The animal gets away, it kills you, or you kill it. And that is how Palaeo Diet played out. In my mind, I thought there would be a bit more narrative to the game and that I’d be more interested to see how the animals reacted. That unfortunately wasn’t the case.

My conclusion based on one game is that Palaeo Diet is not that great as a solo game. It doesn’t have a ton of strategy or narrative to it which is what I wanted. For the game to be a bit more interesting, you need different types of critters so that you have some tactical decisions like which animal might we be able to run up and kill? If you add a couple of other players, then you have even more to chew on such as, “If I fail to kill this mammoth and it flees, it will probably go straight towards Player X and they’ll get it instead”. All this is to say, I think Palaeo Diet would make for a pretty decent convention game if people are looking for something light and with a fair bit of randomness to it. That isn’t what I’m looking for and I don’t think I’ll invest more time and effort into Palaeo Diet as I’d much rather play Hellboy or Fallout, if given the choice.

This means I have a pretty decent amount of ice age animals (10-12, but they’re big and take up a decent amount of storage space) that are unpainted and I don’t have a great use for them. Since I played Palaeo Diet, I skimmed through the Pulp Alley rules and I have a little trouble figuring out how I’d take the animals I have and using them in a Lost World setting. I think it is possible with Pulp Alley but there are no scenarios provided in the book that are a natural fit. There is a campaign or two that I might be able to buy and get some ideas though they aren’t strictly lost world so it could also end up being a wash. I’d like to be able to test the rules out without a lot of hobbying or needing to buy things so I think I’ll put it on the shelf and I may revisit it later or maybe not. Some long term pondering is probably in order here. I have plenty of Fallout and Hellboy stuff to work on and I’m not sure that splitting my hobby time further with another game is wise at the moment. I have a bunch of stuff to get done to keep playing those games, let alone, a third one and there’s tons of display minis I’d like to work on, time permitting too. So yeah, Prehistoric/Pulp gaming is on ice for now but I’ll let you know what I decide whenever I do make a decision on its future.