Through the fence and Defence...To the wheat fields beyond

A teaser for the great emu war demonstration game. Part 1.

We thought seeing as we didn’t actually have a place or a sufficiently good cause to demonstrate we might fine tune the rules (such as they are). “...THWFB”is a beer and skittles game. Anyone taking this too seriously should go and play with a ferret For a while.

The field of battle. Lots of very western Australian wheat fields terrain.

You can see the efforts at social distancing working because the terrain board is so big the players can barely fit into the play testing man cave. Note skittles in background ; beer on its way.

Now let’s introduce the humans in the story;






Firstly the army .

Major Meredith. Sergeant McMurray and gunner O’halloran. Lewis gun armed and looking every bit as dangerous as the Royal Australian Heavy Artillery could in 1932. Nice shorts.

The military tonight were controlled by Roy ‘dice of death’ Inglis.

As this was a play test we only brought three of the factions together. We selected the boys from Pickering Brook because they had a truck ; the old bus.

Here are the lads with the truck. Vic Francias. Ray Owen and Burt Francias. Ray had a 1928 salmson sports car but we don’t have a model so he had to ride in the truck with the others. The Pickering Brook crew left one of the two pictorial records of the expedition.

The lads were controlled by Peter ‘I’m moonlighting from my day job as an old git’ Copley.

The third faction in the rules testing was Fox, the Cinetone news cameraman who was hired by the government to make a newsreel. The surviving footage lay around in the national archives for over 50 years.

That’s not a natty Pom Pom on his hat ; he’s standing in front of some WA wild flowers.

And with a one and a two and a one two three the old bus roared onto the board and immediately nearly ran over a kangaroo. Major Meredith decided to make his own way onto the field from the other approach track.

Vic screeched to a halt; everyone grabbed their rifles and scrambled from the truck. The camera turned ominously.

The great adventure was on.

More next time.