Me so lithic, me rock you long time

Well, it's Paleolithic really, not Mesolithic, but I couldn't resist the title. Sue me. My Bobby Jackson cavemen et al. had their first outing in a Tribal game on Sunday. I packed the boys in my car and took them on a ride to Eric's house in charming West Seattle.

I have enough figures painted to make two fairly good-sized warbands with figures to spare. Most are the Bobby Jackson cavemen from North Star; the rest are Lucid Eye Neanderthals and Neolithics from the Savage Core and Beyond the Savage Core ranges. Each side had a warlord, two heroes, three warbands, and one marksmen unit. Because of the mix of figures I have, one side had two spear units and one with clubs, the other had two club units and one with spears.

We played on my 3x3 F.A.T. Mat from TableWar. I was able to use my recently-painted rock terrain. It was appropriately stone-agey.

We drew for two objectives each. Eric drew a heart (people) and a diamond (loot). His objectives were to kill the person marker (death to the betrayer!) and carry away the loot marker. I drew two clubs (territory) and had to both attack and Defend. I needed to have more of my units on my side than Eric did and more of my units on Eric's side than he did, which I thought might be a stretch. As it turns out, because I drew two clubs, I only needed to achieve one of the objectives, not both.

I cleverly deployed my marksmen atop a rock, although it was by no means a place of vantage to dominate the field. Apart from one hit (which was a good one on Eric's warlord), they were either ineffectively lobbing their missiles into the ground or busy dodging Eric's missiles lobbed at them.

The first flashpoint of the game was on my left / Eric's right. I came on strong charging first my spearmen and then my warlord against a unit of Eric's spearmen. I immediately floundered.

I outnumbered Eric by four units to two over there, but I was on the ropes. My combat hands were just crap. He was more aggressive there than I was. Unknown to me at the time, taking out the Neanderthal mother and child people marker in that area was one of his objectives. He kept trying to blitz through to get at her, but kept bumping into my units and wacking them around.

My much-oppressed spearmen, hero, and warlord were soon joined by a unit of clubmen that had been skulking through the woods to get on Eric's flank.

It wasn't exactly Stonewall at Chancellorsville, but it started to turn the tide.

Over on my right, Eric was moving his other hero around the edge of the board. I countered with my other hero—or shero, I should say, since it's one of my female character figures. She's got a club in one hand and a papoose on her back and she looks mean. She's one of the Lucid Eye Neolithics.

She wasn't as mean as Eric's hero, however. He knocked her around good, baby on her back notwithstanding.

Even with the advantage of ground, she took three wounds while giving out just one. I figured my best plan after that was to keep her out of the way. 

I had a unit of club-armed warriors over on that flank, but I'd moved them in toward the center after Eric came on stronger there. That's the flank where we both had our marksmen—and we both bought the Deadly Shot skill for them. It was standoff for several turns. I wasn't about to expose my units to getting hit with flung sticks and stones and neither was Eric. My only target for several turns was Eric's marksmen, though most turns, we just canceled out each other by expending our activation cards to no effect. It's funny how even in paleolithic times, those soldiers knew how to hunker down against the threat of missile fire.

Eric had a unit of spearmen that he charged in against my clubmen. In a terribly lopsided round (for him) he lost the whole unit without inflicting a single hit on the clubmen. I had a good activation card for the clubs (King of clubs, I think) and drew some very nice cards for my combat hand. Eric's draw was less fortuitous.

It was the first unit either of us had lost so far in the game.

Back on my left, my tribe was getting its groove back. It took some effort, Eric's units selfishly refused to just die, I just kept hurting them and forcing them back. Eventually, my 2:1 advantage paid off and I destroyed both his remaining spearmen and his hero. I lost two spearmen myself and got three wounds each on my hero and warlord. If I didn't have twice the men, we may have wound up like the Kilkenny cats and been left with nothing but our tails. As it was, I had a longer tail.

On my right, Eric committed his warlord to the fray with initially good results. Going in, he took a bullet from my otherwise hapless "deadly shot" "marksmen," but he still rocked me back in the initial clash.

By this time, it was looking grim for Eric. He was down by three units, while I was still at seven, even if some of my units were pretty battered. His four remaining units were formidable, but not likely to reverse his fortunes. My victorious troglodytes from my left were slogging across the swamps towards his remnant.

Keeping my objectives in sight, I bided my time knowing that I could outnumber Eric's guys on both sides of the table if I didn't lose any units. My powergrrl earth-mother shero was down to two wounds left as was my other hero. My warlord was down to four. I had a few losses from my other units as well.

Eric's position was a bit more precarious, but he was no more than a few good combat rounds away from evening things up. His big problem was getting to his objectives. His people marker was well out of reach. His loot marker was close, but I was guarding it. In the last turn, he nevertheless poised himself to take on my diminished unit of clubmen guarding the loot marker.

He might have picked up a few points and cost me a few had we played it out a few more turns. All his warlord—reduced to one wound—could do was gesture defiantly.

Post mortem thoughts

I love Tribal more the more I play it. It doesn't reveal its nuance all at once, but you start to see it almost instantly.

This was the first game we played where we bought skills. Up to now, I've just arranged warbands and stuck to the basics. For this game, I created two basic forces of 6 points each, as I described above. I alloted 15 honor points for warbands, which left 9 honor points for each of us to use buying skills and keeping a reserve pool. With the free skills that come with characters, we didn't need to spend much. 

The variable game objectives are very nice. My first impression was that I would do my own scenario making, but we used objectives in our four-player game at the Fix Bayonet! game day at Fort Steilacoom and I thought they worked very well. It changes the nature of the game dramatically without changing the ultimate goal: getting honor points because "Honour is everything!"

Because the objectives rules require markers for people and loot, I'm looking for ways to represent them. For the cavemen, I have the caveman family figures to use as people markers. For the Bronze Age Europeans, I have Stella, Ursula, the shaman, and Mr. Tambourine Man.

For loot, I've been using some plastic skulls that I bought in bulk from a seller on Etsy. I need to pretty them up and put them on bases. However, I'd like to get something more suitable for each period I do. For the cavemen, I'd love to find a 3D printed Venus of Willendorf that stands about 10mm high. I'm not sure about the BAEs, however. I'll know it when I find it. For now, it's skulls.

Mycenaeans looming

Eric has a big collection of Mycenaean/Trojan War minis that he's eager to do Tribal with. He's been rebasing them as single figures and can field six warbands for a big multiplayer game. He even has Olympian gods!

I have my own stash of unpainted Mycenaeans. As the Caveman Project nears a completion point, I'm now motivated to paint them, starting with the Eureka Bronze Age Greeks. With Eric's horde available, my contribution needs only to be small for now.

Misadventures in motoring

It took about a half hour to get down to Eric's in the morning. The trip back was more adventurous.

I-5 runs through downtown Seattle. It's about as badly engineered a road as you can imagine. To alleviate some of the logjam that it creates for itself going through downtown, there are express lanes that alternate running northbound or southbound depending on the time of day. They're open northbound in the afternoons, but I must have hit them just before they opened. Just. Before. Instead of sailing past all the traffic, I was stuck in it. A few minutes after I passed the onramp to the express lanes, I saw cars going northbound in them to my left.  I repeat: I had just missed it.

The only good thing I noticed is that the left lane that becomes a turn-only lane onto the Seneca St. now continues through. That was always a mess of clueless drivers desperately changing lanes to avoid being forced off into downtown. 

After the long slog of getting past the worst of the northbound traffic, I got the idea to stop at Shake Shack and pick up a burger. Shake Shack is a NYC import. There are four in the Puget Sound area and the new one in Lynnwood is the only one with a drive-thru in the state. I've never been there before and am generally skeptical about new sensations; they never live up to their popularity. I tried to go there for lunch a couple weeks back, but the drive-thru line was very long and very, very slow. I bailed out after five minutes because I could see that nothing was moving and I estimated that by the time I got my food, the meeting I had to get back to in 20 minutes would be more than half over, if not entirely over. I figured that I had time to wait—and did I ever.

I never Yelp (I've seen the South Park episode—no specials for me), but I did about this experience. I was generous and gave it three out of five stars. That was maybe too generous. I noticed several Yelpers giving it one. I thought the food was OK, but not for the price. A surprisingly small burger, fries, and drink came to $21.00. On top of that I spent at least 40 minutes in the drive-thru line. By the time I actually got the food, it was lukewarm and the ice in my lemonade had completely melted, making it watery. How is it that a place makes you wait a long time for your food and then serves it to you almost cold? Shake Shack didn't impress me and I won't be back.

I finally got home at about 3:45, having left Eric's at about 1:15.

Oh, then there was an 4.5 magnitude earthquake in the evening and that was my day.

This coming weekend will be a trek down to Chehalis, WA (somewhere closer to the equator than where I live) for the Veteran's Museum event.

Tiny tin troglodytes (because I’m 3.64% archaic human, you know)

Back on August 16th, I was innocently minding my own business standing outside Silver King Hobbies in Tacoma waiting for it to open so we could play Saga on our biweekly game day. As I waited, I browsed through the Tribal player community group page on Facebook and saw this:

What could I do? I had to have them. 

I tried to order them on the spot, but there was no Wi-Fi and 5G was being squirrely, so I had to wait to order until I got home. I ordered two of the Clan Jakson mega-sets so I could have opposing forces with all the options.

I can't explain why I'm drawn to them apart from the fact that they're beautiful minis, but also a very obscure niche kind of mini. I'm an obscurantist if nothing else. They're also right in line with my current obsession: Tribal. I'll often see minis I love, but won't act on them because I can't think of anything to do with them. For example, Lucid Eye has produced Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons for several years as part of their Savage Core line of figures. I often looked longingly at them online, but never pulled the trigger (until now, see below). When the figures and rules come into alignment, it's, "Brace yourself, bank account, you're about to be pillaged!"

When the figures arrived from North Star (not without first bouncing around various cities for several days after making landfall in the USA and then getting "stored" in Sumner, WA for three days), I oohed and aahed over them. They were all I hoped they'd be.

There are five packs in all for a total of 25 poses.

The main force that makes up the warrior units are a pack with club-armed figures and a pack with spear-armed figures. The Clan Jakson set comes with two of each pack, enough to make four warrior units for your warband.

The firepower (such as it is) comes from the marksmen pack. These appear to be younger men/boys who would rather throw rocks and javelin-like sticks than get in close. Clan Jakson come with two packs of these, which is enough to provide the maximum allowed two marksmen units in your warband.

The warlord and heroes are provided by a separate pack. All of the heroes stand out from the crowd. There's one pack in the Clan Jakson set, which is enough for your warlord and four heroes.

Finally, there's a really nice pack that doesn't provide troops for your warband, but will come in very handy for playing the game. To keep the cave-fires burning when their men are away, there's a caveman family group pack with women, children, and wee troglodyte bairns.

They're great, but the women look nothing like Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. Maybe they represent a time before the fur bikini was invented—or more likely after it became passé because Neanderthals lived between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, much later than Raquel's time.

They don't look like Wilma and Betty either, but their nonconformity to iconic paragons of paleolithic pulchritude doesn't distract from them at all.

The figures are beautiful with a lot of detail and well-animated poses. They've really put Bobby Jackson on my radar screen. He's best known for the excellent figures he's sculpted for Reaper Bones, so I've not seen a lot of his work before. He made the caveman figures because he's a Tribal player and sculpted his own custom warband because he can.

Painting

I thought a bit about how I'd paint these figures and decided that instead of my now-standard dip method, I'd go with mostly Citadel Contrast Paints and Army Painter Speed Paints. I wanted to get the one-and-done effect of things like the fur, which they all wear in abundance.

Skin - I wasn't sure what color to use for the Neanderthal's skin. Sources vary from saying than Neanderthals were darker skinned and darker haired to others who cite DNA evidence that points to fair skin and red or even blond hair. Not really knowing what I was going to get, I applied Citadel Guilliman Flesh. I'm happy how it turned out. They look pretty earthy, like they haven't washed in 40,000 years.

Furs - I got as many browns and grays as I could find as contrats paints or speed paints. I wanted to avoid a monochrome look for the furs. In a few cases, I did a light drybrush over an application of the contrast paint just to better highlight the raised bits. I'm pretty happy how that turned out.

Leather - there's a lot of exposed leather bits, such as the turned back meaty side of a fur. I was disappointed with the options for leather colors among the contrast and speed paints. As with the furs, Citadel has a color called Snakebite Leather, which goes on pretty dark. I used Army Painter Ancient Honey for some leather bits, but it's pretty yellow and I toned it down with a wash of Army Painter Soft Tone. Otherwise, I used Vallejo and Reaper leather colors that I applied as a wash or highlighted then washed afterwards. Some of the browns I used for the fur colors would work for other leather shades, but I wanted to keep the colors distinct.

Hair - I went with a variety of hair colors, but nothing too far out. I used a lot of auburn/chestnut color with a few darker brown. Several have a Vallejo color called Shrapnel Red, which makes for a nice deep red hair color. I highlighted that with a bit of Orange-Red. Finally, starting with a base of a light tan, I added yellow ochre highlights to get a few blondes in the mix, because they have more fun.

Stone - I imagined at first that I'd try to replicate the varied colors of flint, but settled instead on the Reaper Paint Stonewall Grey, which I applied to all the state-of-the-art weaponry.

Washes - In a few places, I used regular ol' paints, like for the stone bits, but also for the wood bits and the twine bits and the decorative shells and tooth bits. In all those cases, I used Army Painter Soft Tone applied just in the specific areas. I think I might also have used Citadel Agrax Shader (or was it Nuln Oil) at some place. In any case, washes were local and not an overall application to the figures.

Bases

I went with fender washers for the bases. All the warriors and marksmen are on 1" fender washers. The warlord and heroes are on 1 1/4" fender washers so they stand out a bit. I haven't done the family group yet, but I'll likely put them on 1 1/4" bases for the women with children castings and maybe a 1 1/2" base combining the single female figure and the zwei kinder.

I've used fender washers for my Xenos Rampant figures, Vietnam figures, and some ECW skirmish figures, so this basing is nothing new. I like the heft of the metal base (lack of heft is one reason why I never do plastic minis). Because I'm not doing the whole dip routine, I can mount the figure and apply the coarse pumice gel medium for texture before I start painting the mini.

I took my time with the first batch of 20: five spearmen, five clubmen, five marksmen, and five heroes. I gave them a shot of Krylon Matt Finish after painting the figures and before I started on the bases.

The result

I'm happy with how they turned out. I'm not sure if I'll use the contrast/speed paints much on other projects, but I'm glad I'm doing it for these.

I've got 60 more figures to go, but I can probably go faster with them, although I'm not sure I'll do 20-figure batches again. (No, I probably will.)

Newcomers

I mentioned above that I'd often looked longingly at the Lucid Eye Neanderthals. I decided to get some with an eye—a lucid eye—to mixing them in with the Bobby Jackson figures to get an even better mix of poses and such. I wasn't sure if they'd match, but I was surprised to see how well they do.

They don't have as many different poses at the Bobby Jackson figures, but they're all quite nice. There are two packs of warriors with mixed weapons, one hero/warlord type, and a female shaman type.

The hero figure is wee bit larger than the average figure and fearsome. He's definitely on a larger base as another hero or warlord.

I also got a figure that's more fantasy than reality. Give her a fur bikini and she'd be a dead ringer for Raquel.

She's labeled as Vahira the Herd Witch and described as a Neanderthal Cro-Magnon mix. She's as winsome as any full Neanderthal lass moodily wandering the Pleistocene heather pining for her troglodyte Heathcliff.

She's also carrying what looks to be an entirely imaginary stone/flint sword, but that's common with figures from Lucid Eye's Savage Core: Age of Ice range. There's a fantasy element to them that just requires some to wield some kind of swordy thing. I'd be surprised if anything like that stone sword shows up in some paleontologist's dig. I could use her as a person token for the game objectives or as a shaman character. In any case, she's on a 1 1/4" fender washer, so stone sword or no, she isn't going into a warrior unit.

I'm coming a long with these pretty well. They have less little detail bits than the Bobby Jackson figures, so they paint quicker. I'm hoping to have them done by the weekend. Then on to another batch of Bobby Jackson figures.

My ancestors, my inspiration

I noted in the title that I'm 3.64% archaic human. According to Living DNA, I am 1.92% Neanderthal:

And 1.72% Denisovan:

I can feel my knuckles dragging as I type this, but it could also be that I'm a poor typist. In any case, painting cavemen has a special interest for me now that I know I am one. My ethnic background is varied, but limited to the British Isles and Northern Europe. I'm more than twice as much caveman as I am Welsh. Although I've been to Wales, I have no interest in spelunking.