Le Mud....Le Blood. The Great Emu War Part 3

and they said it couldn't be done

 

The rules

The game starts with the players balancing dice on their noses. It's all downhill from there.

A chip for each faction and the wild life is put into a bag so they can be drawn out again later. The wild life blinds are all put somewhere else so they can be randomly drawn.

A chip is drawn out of the bag which is either a faction, smoko, the animals moving, or something else. If its the wildlife all the animals on the board move in a random direction. If it's a faction then the player rolls to see how far they get to move and how many actions they can have.

The actions include shooting things, getting up and down out of trucks, climbing trees, fighting, trying to bribe the umpire, and anything else that you think you could waste an action point on.

There are also various chips for allowing all the wildlife to move and to see whether it rains or the visibility gets better or worse.

The faction leader then throws to see how many random wildlife blinds will be put on the board. There is a maximum of three per faction per turn ; so it can get pretty crowded pretty fast. After the random wild life have been placed the faction can attempt to spot the animals.

Wildly blasting away at unspotted wild life can be fun. However given that Fox will be filming everything it is not recommended that rare and endangered wildlife, or really cute ones get exterminated. The army are under orders NOT to blast anything that could get undue publicity (which didn't stop them).

Wildlife blinds are tokens with the type of creature on the back. In this case we took a gamble ; printed up some stickers and slapped them onto some spare poker chips. Once spotted the chip is replaced with a real base of animals

Because we can....a spinner is used to determine the direction of the animals coming on to the board. Here is Fox shooting from a lovely vantage point some emus and roos marauding away in a wheat field. Those are wombats in the distance.

Following this housekeeping the faction then steps out to achieve fame, glory, or a small obituary column in the Newspaper. Animals will react if shot at and may die, run like buggery, or stampede. 

This can produce an almost endless round of stampeding animals and flying bullets.

Animals running like buggery do just that....they run off. Stampeding animals however lose all sense of  common sense and run randomly. If there is a human in the road they will attempt to run through or over the individual concerned. 

Emus are big and hefty and fast; roos are also fast and heavy and have the added bonus of being able to kick your stomach out through your spine if they feel like a good punch up. Foxes bite but rarely stand up to a fight and snakes in Australia are just deadly and best left alone. Dingoes despite looking very cute are a wild dog and have big teeth and are a predator.

Here's Major Meredith with various wild life closing in. The Cockatoos and the rabbits probably aren't going to be too much trouble but that is a BIG Roo and a very close Emu. You can't trust them to do anything sensible at that range.

Other stampedes however were just too much fun to be left out. See how silly you feel when stampeding echidnas come your way. The top speed is about 10 metres an hour, a big one is about 30 cm  in length, they have stubby little legs and a snout for eating ants. The danger is trying to pick them up because they have spines and you can get a nasty scratch. In the test a base of echidnas was detected early and waddled around keeping the truck at bay. 

 Here we see a base of killer echidnas thinking about a clever way to take on the truck.

Rabbit stampedes can be painful in the lower leg region, wombats bite and can wreck a car if you run over them (and can also get up to about 30 kph on a good day). Getting stuck in a stampeding flock of sulphur crested cockatoos or crows is something just best left to the imagination...and never handle an angry wedge tailed eagle if you can help it (because it leads to to your partners asking just which bit of bloody great talon equipped bird with a huge hooked beak were you having trouble with?).

The main thing about stampeding animals is that if the character is in the way, sheer weight of animal flesh can cause some issues (like death). Emus are not that aggressive (in fact they like nothing better than to play games, investigate new things, steal things and eat stuff) however getting hit by one at 40 - 50 kph will soon change your mind about a lot of things (including whether they deserve conservation status).

Here for example is Gunner O'Halloran staring down an emu at which he rather stupidly shot at close range. It instantly stampeded...directly toward him...leapt the fence and stomped him into the turf before fleeing madly in the general direction of away.

He suffered a wound (and a general round of compatriot laughter), picked himself up and proceeded to demonstrate how to jam a Lewis Gun.

 

The Black Plumed Generals

If you would like to include the so called black plumed generals then its simple enough for a player to look after the wild life and use their actions to charge, kill, maim, and otherwise dissuade the humans from the inclination to eradicate other life forms. We made up about 50 different wild life bases in this set.....dozens of emus, roos, dingoes and rabbits. If you want a different mix of critters just include something else and let it randomly pop up. 

Goannas (not that lethal but they tend to go for the highest point when panicked.....which can be the nearest human....so all good fun). 

A serpent of the tree dwelling kind. This one appeared as a random blind and then stalked the Francias brothers across a couple of fields before slithering away to somewhere quieter.

And of course...EMUs....without whom there would be no silly game. Due to overzealous collecting we managed to obtain about 50 emu figures (including some really cute baby ones).

The next shot shows an assortment of dingoes, foxes, emus and Roos. This is the odd point where squillions of animals kept coming onto the board. You can see O'Halloran being stomped to the right and Major Meredith in the centre wondering what was going on. We suspected some sort of off board breeding programme.

Don't worry if you can't find suitable figures for your wild life collection....just add animals from whatever collections you can find. Possums, koalas, drop bears, more snakes....Australia has thousands of creatures that can be lethal in the right circumstances. Koalas might look cuddly but try to have a serious discussion with a bull when it's the mating season. There are fresh water crayfish than can take a finger off if you stick your hand in the water.

 

When the end of game conditions are finally met (they include the police coming around, and possibly the food running out) the victory points are tallied and the winner gets to gloat in their Emu Wars T shirt.

The spinner is used to determine the direction in which an animal comes onto the board and also the direction in which it stampedes. 

Here an Emu shot by the Pickering Brook crowd screams off across the wheat field watched by Fox.




Here the Pickering Brook lads get ready for their assault on the fields by lining up an errant emu. They had driven before them a collection of dingoes, roos, and a Wombat. The Emu did diddly squat (an acceptable action in this game) and the lads moved on to better targets.

In this shot you can see Sergeant McMurray venturing along the fence line  to try to pot the increasing numbers of emus in the centre. He managed to jam the Lewis gun...twice.....but claims he winged a few.

The final scene ; creatures everywhere. Off to the top right the Pickering Brook team are blasting nearly everything that pops its head above the wheat and scrub.

To the top centre, the Army is wondering which army surplus store provided the Lewis Guns as they are pretty unreliable.

An emu-lation  for every occasion

Remember this is supposed to be fun. The beauty of using the simple REP system is that you can play this about a zillion times and come up with a completely different narrative each time. Also the more beer you drink the more sensible the game seems. If you don't like beer try apple cider

If you don't like Australian animals just insert some local ones....Im sure beavers are deadly if you get too close...and I'm sure I've read about people being killed by plagues of field mice.

Go to town.

Now we just need the Covid 19 restrictions to be lifted and we can go out and suck people into thinking we are serious military simulationists rather than freak dudes who spend their time trying to think of ways to perpetrate violence on the wild life. I'm looking forward to a discussion about conservation with some parents while their children are blasting native animals and enjoying it...

For the record....Pickering Brook registered a stunning victory over the army in the play test. Vic and the boys got to the wheat fields and blasted anything that moved coming across the rippling sea of vegetation. This was despite being stalked by an echidna and a rather large snake. The army on the other hand managed to plonk itself in the middle of some sort of animal star gate where stuff just kept coming on to the board next to them.......one soldier was toppled by a rampaging emu but in the main they managed to sort out which end of the Lewis gun was which and let loose. As predicted the Lewis Guns jammed frequently.

When we get to actually do this as a demonstration we will post some more.

In the meantime if you would like the rules and the background briefing let us know and we will post them.

Happy Hunting.