I’ve fallen in love with the board games of Tom Wham apparently. Between his endearing artwork and clever themes and mechanics, they’re a real delight.

In Elefant Hunt, you take on the role of a great white hunter organizing a safari expedition in the wilds of Aferca. In port you gather supplies and hire other hunters (native and foreign); then when your expedition is strong enough, you move along the board and capture as many animals as you can, cashing them in at port to increase your score. The first player to reach 100 points wins.

It’s a clever mix of mechanics, combining traditional roll-and-move with the sort of war game combat TSR games were known for in the 70s. You roll and move that many spaces, and whatever space you end on has a particular effect. Swamps eat your supplies, quicksand eats your hunters, and there’s treasure and ivory to be found in the Lost City and Elefant Graveyard respectively.

And if you land on a blank space where there’s nothing to do, your expedition camps for the night and consumes your precious supplies. Gluttonous white hunters always consume 1 supply apiece, while it takes 2 native hunters (with red text) to consume a single supply (rounded up if you don’t have native buddies in 2’s).

Your expedition is represented by the colored marker with your hunter’s face on it. This is what’s actually moved around the board; the people and things comprising your expedition–hunters, supplies, captured animals, and treasures–are kept off-board in front of you. One player will have to be the scorekeeper, using pen and paper to track everyone’s points.

When you encounter animals in the wild, you draw the number of animals indicated on the Hunt Space, then plan out how to divide your expedition for the hunt: do you all gang up on a single creature to guarantee a capture? or do you get greedy and split them up in the hope of a bigger haul? Killer animals (marked with a red dot) make these decisions trickier, since any killer animal that escapes capture will eat one of your hunters on its way out.

The characters are all colorful, as always. There’s a wide array of hilarious animals to encounter, from giraffes to hyenas, gorillas and zebras, and even the valuable elefants. Every hunter is unique, and some are more useful than others. You can fire a hunter anytime before you move, if that hunter proves to be more trouble than he’s worth.

My favorite character of the bunch is Sandra, who is basically the chick from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: an out-of-her-depth city girl who is worth -2 if you use her on a hunt, and still consumes supplies like anyone else. She’s worth keeping around as expendable fodder to throw at quicksand or killer animals.

The more animals you collect, the stronger your hunter character becomes, too. Each player begins with a rating of 1, but they eventually level up to 3, and then 5 as the game progresses. That’s the best time to venture deep into the bush and make a go for the Elefant Graveyard or Lost City. The further across the board you go, the more dangers you’ll face, and the more supplies you’ll consume…but you’ll encounter greater numbers of animals and score big if you make it back to port in one piece!

Elefant Hunt is a print-and-play game, so unfortunately it’s never had a professional release as a proper board game. You can download the files you need over at BoardGameGeek if you want to play it…just make sure you have craft supplies handy, and beware that the rules are poorly formatted and sometimes hard to read unless you clean them up yourself a little.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.