Review - Jurassic Wars

Today I'm having a look at yet another impulse purchase; a cheap travel card game called Jurassic Wars. The game features dinosaur cards which fight each other until one player has no cards left.  It feels like you're playing a more advanced version of Top Trumps.

The game comes in a small, but sturdy box, which is labelled as a 'dice arena', but it's just a box really.  The box contains a rules booklet, 7 dice and 33 cards.  The rules booklet is in black and white and is 8 pages long.  The rules are clearly and concisely written and we had no issues with understanding how it was to work.  You get 7 6-sided dice, 4 green (for the herbivores) and 3 red (for the carnivores), the green ones have 2 faces with stars and the red ones 3 faces with stars.  It's a nice little touch that they did special dice, ordinary D6's would have worked just as well, but simplifies the process a bit and makes the game more accessible.  Then finally what you're really paying for is the cards, they're standard playing card sized and seem to be of reasonable quality.  One thing I'm really impressed with is the artwork on the cards each dinosaur has been brilliantly rendered , if I'd have had these as a kid I've have spent hours just looking at the pictures.

Gameplay is a series of one on one dinosaur combats, which sees players rolling the number and type of dice shown on the dino's card and the player with the most stars wins that round and either reduces the opponents dice or kills him if there are no dice left to remove.  Play keeps going until only one player has no dinosaurs left.  Tactics revolve around which order to play your cards and when to play your limited supply of combat cards (that have various affects on the dice).

I think it works best as a two-player game really, and if you have the full 5 players there's going to be a bit to much waiting for your turn.  There's only so much depth in the basic game, but there's already a bunch of extra rules on the website which add that extra depth to the game and includes a couple of new ways to play too.

In my introduction I labelled this as a travel game, but that's not really fair, whilst it is suitable as a travel game due to its small size, we've been having lots of fun with this at home on the dinning room table.

In conclusion this is a great little game, inexpensive, good mechanics, suitable for players of different levels and with a great theme as well.  Highly recommended!

Hunters, Explorers and Adventurers - Part 2

Somewhat later than anticipated we have my second bunch of explorers that I plan to take dinosaur hunting.

Starting with these 4 from North Star games.  These are the first models I've got from Northstar, pretty good on the whole, nice detail and character, but there was a lot of flash.

and then these which are from foundry like the last lot.

You'll notice a Renaissance captain looking slightly out of place on the right, foundry have started giving away a free model with orders (a fantastic policy) and this was Julys free model, jolly nice he is too.

Hunters, Explorers and Adventurers - Part 1

The latest additions to my collection are these models from Foundry's Darkest Africa range.

Starting off with a pack called 'Clean limbed British officers and adventurers' which is a brilliant title, and has some fantastic models, and even includes an Allan Quartermain (middle left) who's one of my favourite characters.

This next pack is called 'eccentric explorers', which is actually a group of historical explorers of Africa.  from left to right, Sir Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, Dr Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Sir Samuel Baker, and the German Carl peters.  Another great set, with some of the key characters of the Victorian era in Africa.

And finally 'big game hunt' which includes a German hunter, some native helpers and a lion to hunt. 

And what are these for? Well the idea is to go hunting, but hunting for dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties!  In the deepest African jungle in the year 1890, some mysterious creatures have been spotted and the race is on to bring back specimens to the great Museums in London and around Europe.  Not entirely sure on rules yet, will be homebrew of some sort, and we plan to have a bit of fun with this. 

Dino Skeleton Terrain

I recently bought a couple of toy dinosaur skeletons from poundland and have actually followed through on my intention to turn them into a couple of basic terrain pieces.  I didn't do much too them, simply stuck them to a piece of card painted green and flocked, and gave them a simple gyphon sepia wash.  It seems to have worked out alright, I'm not claiming they're fantastic, but for the price paid they will do the job nicely.

The Remains of a 'Carnosaur'

The Remains of a 'Stegodon'

Some Lizardmen advance through the remians of there dead servants.

Dinosaur Skeletons

I had an hour to kill in the town center today and ended up milling around various shops, one of which was poundland, and I came out with two tubes containg plastic dinosaur skeletons.  One is marked as a Triceratops and one as a Tyranosaurus.

Obviously they cost a quid each,  which isn't bad I think, and my plan is to turn them into terrain pices for use in warhammer (now renamed as carnosaur and stegadon skeletons) and 40K (there's some dangerous stuff on those death worlds).

The Dinosaurs assembled and put next to a mantic revenant for scale

Now they're not fantastic, but what do you expect for a pound, and I do think a few monstrous skeletons will add to a battlefeild.  Also it will simply be nice to have a couple of new pieces of terrain, I rarely spend any money (or time) on terrain as I prefer to do the models, something I keep meaning to change but never quite getting there.

The plan, something like this on a flaocked base, possibly given a wash.