Outdoor Survival again

 Continuing the bits of board gaming on our four-day weekend, next up was the old classic Outdoor Survival (Avalon Hill, 1972).  Big points for Anne for being adventurous enough to give it a shot.  I've had the game since high school and even then it was hard to find anyone to play it again after the first game or two.  The most common reaction would be "Yeah, I want to spend another 3 hours dying of thirst ten different ways," and the guys would rather play something massive (usually Rise & Decline of the Third Reich) instead because at least they would get to blow some stuff up.

I always run game one as a basic intro with the Lost scenario.  It has pretty harsh food and water needs, and for a player's first run, just ignore the Wilderness Encounter rules on the back of the scenario cards.  A few ways to nerf the game to prevent a rage quit: let shacks count as both food and water, and let movement along a river be 2 points per hex and count as a single direction, the way that trails do.  So, the first game was fairly tame.  Anne ended up beating me.  Since I coached most of those moves, it's more like I beat myself, I guess.

For game two, I went with the Survival scenario.  A basic dash across the board with moderate food and water needs.  I ended up dying one scrub hex away from the pool of water that would have saved me, near that bottom center shack.  Boom, she wins again.

For game three, we ran the Rescue scenario, which is my personal favorite.  Water is not an issue, you can get food by passing through a food hex, so you get to focus on getting to those flipped chits to see if they are Missing Persons or just blank screw-ups.  This time we used the Wilderness Encounters on rolling a 5-6 at the end of your turn, but I find them to be weak and don't add much.  The first chip I got to was in the middle of the desert but turned out to be a missing person, while Anne's first was a dud.  I had some issues getting back out of the desert to a shack, rolling an encounter and a penalty almost every turn.  Her second chip was a missing person and she had a clear shot of open terrain back to the lower left edge of the map.  So she beat me by about 8 spaces.

One could argue that the Wilderness Encounter rules should just be forgotten altogether, for all scenarios.  They are a bit dumb.  You actually get to pick a column, like "Hey, Insects/Animals sounds like fun."  Or do the d6 roll where 1-3 is column 1, 4-5 is column 2, and 6 is Personal.  Only roll that one die yet again and maybe move a chit from one box to another or lose a turn.

Some interesting notes on this game's place in gaming history:
- we had randomly come across a biography of H.G.Wells the night before.  It described his odd life and writings and career, after which I mentioned his lesser known works where he tried to write up organized rules for toy soldier battles, a precursor or miniatures wargaming.  Off the top of my head these were "Floor Games" in 1910 and "Little Wars" in 1913, and both can be found on gutenberg.org.
- Outdoor Survival itself was a big seller for Avalon Hill, who largely pioneered wargaming on hex maps.  Not everyone can afford a ton of miniatures, so their games boiled it down to the now common cardboard chips and sturdy maps.
- the Outdoor Survival map has been described as a big influence on the early D&D authors, who had used it for outdoor encounters on many occasions.  D&D itself was originally an add-on to a miniatures wargaming series, expanding the soldiers into actual characters with traits and skills, and adding fantasy creatures into the fray.  The classic "Isle of Dread" module was the first to bring outdoor hex maps into D&D.  Now it is ubiquitous, with thousands of outdoor hex maps across the RPG and wargaming and simulations universe, on into the computer age.

Outdoor Survival may not be the most exciting bunch of die-rolling ever, but it IS a classic ans sits at a special crossroads of gaming history.

I did not get any photos of the game in progress.  It's the same map as always, just with our few little pieces stuck in the wilderness.