Hide, Stone, and Bone is the latest game in the Osprey Wargames series. In this blog we’ll take a look at one of the game’s key features, Big Days.

 

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Hide, Stone, and Bone is a game of skirmish and survival in a prehistoric age. After creating your tribe, you’ll embark on a campaign played out over a series of seasons (turns). Each season involves allocating the members of your tribe to different activities from making tools to procreation. All of these will help your tribe grow, survive and thrive.

Big Days are events that will be remembered around your tribe’s campfires for many seasons to come. They are the scenarios you’ll play on the tabletop in Hide, Stone, and Bone. Generally, each tribe will undertake a single Big Day per season, electing either to hunt or raid. 

 

A stylised cave painting illustration depicting people with spears fighting a bear outside a cave

 

Hunts pit your warriors against predators that threatened your tribe or are great expeditions to bring down megafauna for food. Can you successfully coordinate your hunters to bring down a woolly mammoth or corral aurochs without being trampled? Or perhaps you’re choosing your bravest warriors to seek out and destroy the den of a fearsome Smilodon. Other players can step in to take control of the beast or they can be run solo using the Beast Instinct table to control their actions. 

 

A stylised cave painting illustration depicting a group of people with weapons attacking another around their campfire, caves and tents

 

Raids bring the tribes taking part in a campaign into direct conflict. This could be for a ritual battle to test the strongest warriors in each tribe. An attempt to capture members of a rival tribe or simply ambushing another tribe out hunting and foraging.

Whichever type of Big Day you choose to take, there’s always the chance that you’ll fall afoul of local predators, forcing you to abort your plans and confront them instead. 

 

A stylised cave painting illustration depicting a diverse array of dinosaurs attacking a campfire surrounded by people

 

For a pulpier spin on the core rules, experienced players might choose to explore elements of the World Beneath. Testing the stone spears of your tribe against the fearsome might of dinosaurs, mysterious pre-cursor civilizations and even strange adventurers from the future and their deadly boom sticks.

An extract from the Hide, Stone, and Bone optional rules for adding Pulp Adventurers

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Hide, Stone, and Bone is available to pre-order now.

Releases 29th Jan UK & 27th Jan US.

Written by Austin Hunt & illustrated by Mars Oosterveld.

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