Prehistoric

Cavemen: The Quest for Fire is a card-drafting game in which players take the role of tribal leaders. The tribes compete for opportunities to hunt dinosaurs, recruit tribesmen, and discover new technologies, vying to be the first with enough knowledge and prestige to invent fire and usher in the age of modern humanity!

You have two resources to manage: Food and Teeth. You must spend Food each turn in order to keep your Tribe from starving. Teeth indicate prestige among the tribes. Use Teeth to bid for the conch and to acquire Cavemen and Caves.

Each turn, cards are drawn from the deck to fill a common Card Pool. Players take actions based on what is available in the pool. For example, if a Beast is drawn into the Card Pool, you can hunt it for Food and claim its Teeth as a sign of your bravery.

If you hold the conch during the Action Phase, you benefit by taking your Action first and taking a second Action after everyone else has gone once. Players can bid Teeth to take control of the Conch from another player. This can be important to get the first pick of the cards in the Card Pool.

The game features 21 different inventions that allow players to evolve diverse strategies, capitalizing on their tribe's individual strengths. There are challenging decisions every turn as players must evaluate what resources are available, guess what their opponents will do, and weigh the amount of risk they're willing to take.

On an icy lake, two clans of prehistoric men clash in a match of Kairn, better known as Caveman Curling, this being an ancestor to the modern sport of curling. Players compete as individuals or are grouped into two clans, and they try to land their stones the closest to a target each round. On a player's turn he takes two actions:

• He launches a stone across the ice, flicking it with his finger toward the target on the other end of the game board.

• To improve the positioning of his stone or the chances of it staying in place, he can choose to use either a small or large hammer or a totem. With a hammer, the player moves the stone according to the size of the hammer. As for the totem, the player sets it on top of the stone; if the totem falls off the stone, the player can shoot it again on a later turn.

If your player or clan has one or more stones closer to the center of the target than the other clan, you score points. The first player/clan to collect six points wins.

A note about the different editions.

Caveman Curling (2012)
Kairn (2010)

There are significant production differences between Kairn and Caveman Curling, though the game play is almost identical between the two versions. Kairn (200 copies) was designed and self-published by Daniel Quodbach in 2010. Blackrock Editions and Scorpion Masque produced 1000 copies of Kairn and released it at Essen in 2011. Gryphon Games version of the game has yet to be produced, pending the conclusion of a current Kickstarter campaign that was organized to gauge demand for its version. Caveman Curling is scheduled for mass production in January, 2012, and to be released in late February, 2012. The first and only production copy of the Gryphon version will arrive in the US on December 14, 2011 and a video will be made showing the differences between Kairn and Caveman Curling.