Custom WP admin dashboard

I thought this would be fairly simple but haven’t yet found a way of displaying a fixed custom admin dashboard page rather than the usual meta boxes.

Sure I can remove/add custom meta boxes all day long. But I’d like to be able to display a fixed (non-meta-box based) welcome page on the dashboard, instead of the usual meta boxes?

Apart from using custom redirect rules, anyone know of a way this can be achieved?