Cowboy Action and Gutshot!

"Head 'em off at Eagle Pass!"

We played Hawgleg publishing's Gutshot! rules last night for the first time, and wow, I loved them. But first, before I get into that, let me talk about the above film clip, speaking of cowboys. That's me in the white shirt in my first ever SASS event a few years back. It turned out to also be my last event, it just wasn't the right speed I was looking for, not as much "action" as I thought it would be. Anyway, as you can see from the video, it was a lot of fun regardless. It can be pretty expensive outfitting your 'character' with all the right clothing, guns, and leather though, almost prohibitively so. I sold all of my gear, but at least I still kept my boots! Playing Gutshot! last night kind of took me back though to the days of "Mankato Mik". I only did it once, but at least I can say I was cowboy at one point, haha.


The sleepy, little town of Big Rock Flats

I forgot to head over to Andy's house and pick up his painted cowboys and Whitewash city terrain. You can see most of that in our last game of PKowboys here. We made do without, Chrispy had some cowboy figs, and a single buildings, the rest of the terrain were some fantasy buildings and a load of rocky terrain. It was more than suitable.


The dastardly Iguanodon Juan and sidekick Twitch McGuffin


Sheriff Mankato and his date for the evening, Lady Sunset


As the couple exits the saloon, unaware of bandits on the hill

In Gutshot! your characters have different levels, each level giving them a different ability or two. The levels are cleverly named, "sheriff" doesn't necessarily mean you are an actual sheriff, just you have sheriff-comparable stats and abilities. The same goes for townsfolk and the like. There were at least five or six different types of characters I remember being available. Some characters come with standard perks, but some, like my sheriff, have a few options you can pick from. Everyone also gets two gun types each.


Drunken laughter echoes from the edge of the cliffs...

Each character has a single target number. This is your base roll you need to achieve in order to perform an action, rolled on 2d6. This is further modified by positive effects, such as aiming, or negative effects, like being in cover. The mechanics themselves are actually very straight forward, in a a given turn you can usually perform two actions, but from the list of choices you have, you can never do the same action twice in a turn.


Iguanodon Juan lines up a shot on an unsuspecting dame

In our first game, we played with just two characters per side. But even with a posse of five to ten characters or so, the rules keep the game moving at a fast clip. Our first game was also a stand up and shoot scenario, but it looked like the book has all kinds of cool sounding scenarios. One Chrispy described as a young cowboy who was wanting to elope with a rancher's daughter, except dad has decided to stop the couple and take out the suitor. It's true love, and posse on posse action as the young couple's fate is decided.


Combat is also deadly. Your characters have a set number of wounds, sometimes offset by skills and talents, but when they're up, your ticket's punched. There's two wound types; "pain" and "damage". The former covers things like melee damage, falling, and the like. The second is would be the lethal type of wounds from knives and guns. Also, when someone shoots and hits you, you can immediately do reactionary fire and shoot back, so it's possible to have cinematic moments where both combatants kill each other simultaneously.


"Hey man, watch this...WHOAAA!"

Gutshot! is more than just combat too. There's all kinds of actions to perform, and here we see Chri3 failing his 'climb' check. He tried to take a shortcut down the front of the clifface, and took a tumble. It didn't kill him, but he took a fair amount of 'pain' wounds. Although we didn't use them, there are options for dynamite, horses, and more.


Sheriff Mankato, severely wounded, hides atop the rocks

There's a neat way to track your ammo usage too, well, not "neat", but clever I guess. You definitely don't want both of your barrels empty on your stagecoach gun when someone rushes you in the middle of the street. You can also pick up equipment off of slain characters and make use of their gear. Pretty handy when you're a derringer-wielding saloon girl, but a bandit just dropped at your feet with a lever-action rifle. The initiative system was pretty cool too. Technically you're supposed to fraw numbers out of a hat each turn to see who goes when. We just rolled a die each round, and assigned numbers to characters. My gambler character had a trait that let her have two numbers 'in the hat' each round.


I'd be remiss if I didn't somehow compare Gutshot! to PKowboys, which has be the only cowboy game I've been playing for years now. In a nutshell, Gutshot! was faster to play, easier to setup, and simple to grasp. Fast enough where you can get in multiple games in a night, so a three fight mini-campaign is feasible. Easy to setup because all you do is roll on a table to see what kind of characters you get and pick their skills. Simple to grasp where after about a night or two of playing, you probably won't need to refer to the rulebook very often, if at all. Will I play PKowboys again? Sure, but I tell you, Gutshot! seemed a lot leaner and meaner to sink your teeth into. PKowboys is an older game, fun sure, but it's starting to show its age a bit. Plus, throw in that Gutshot! is also coming out with zombies...

Centaur Princess Chronicles, pt. 5

copyright Wayne Reynolds

The Centaur Princess Chronicles

"There was a princess who lived in the forest. She was a centaur; half horse and half human. She wore her long, brown hair in thick braids and she had sparkling green eyes. She and her tribe were respectful of nature. Today was a special day because it was her birthday."

"It was the centaur princess' 16th birthday, which was special in her tribe. This meant that she was old enough to be considered a responsible adult. To prove this, she had to do a special quest. She got to pick what her quest would be."

"The centaur princess went to the oldest of the tribe, the wise woman. The wise woman was the keeper of the stories and she had many books in her hut. The two stayed up long in the night, reading about these legends by candlelight."

"There was a tale of old that spoke about an ice crown that belonged to a centaur queen. It was a very magical crown and all the best wizards helped to make it. There was an ogre; a large, terrible ogre warlock who was jealous and wanted the crown for himself."

"In a battle only remembered in ancient books, the ogre warlock attacked the centaurs. He had many monsters to help him. He stole the ice crown and fled to his fortress in the mountains."

Dominion Grandé

Andy had picked up Dominion by Rio Grande Games, so we broke it out the other night and played a debut game. Neither of us had read the rules, although Andy had the gist of it, but we were able to hit the ground rolling in surprisingly little time.

Based on awards alone, this one seems like a 'must have', including the top 'game of the year' in 2009. So what's all the fuss about? I've seen it for as little as $33 bucks online, which seems like a good price for such a vaunted game. I labeled it as a 'boardgame' below, but really it's a card game, and after seeing what you get in the box, that's what you get indeed. Five hundred cards round out the game, no tokens or figures, just cards, your playing surface is your table. There is a nifty, plastic card divider in the box to separate the cards out by type, and a clever organizer template that goes in the middle that labels which cards are where.

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end. -from BGG

I'm not kidding, by the third turn, Andy and I knew what we were doing, and knew it well. The mechanics are so simple to grasp, it takes no time at all to jump right in. It's solidly in that category of "easy to learn, difficult to master". In fact, our turns were going along at a quick clip too, the only times we slowed down was when we had to reshuffle a deck.


So basically you're building a deck against one another of cards. You build your deck with places such as the smithy or a mine, which give you bonus actions, or you can take cards such as militia which affects your opponent, of course more cards, like the moat, can thwart attackers. Just thinking about talking about all the cards can make you go crazy, suffice it to say there's a ton of varieties and they all act (and interact) in all kinds of ways.

You buy these cards with coins you pick up during the game. If you have too many places in your hand, and not enough coin, you'll never be able to buy anything, but too many coins and not enough items...well you can never do anything. You win the game by having the most number of estates, fiefdoms, and the like. Of course if you're buying these up, you lose out on everything else. Once the game picked up pace, the tension was building and you find yourself reacting to the other player while subtly trying to take the initiative on your own. The game was close, the final score being Andy with 42 points, and me with 38.

The replay value is wide open with Dominion, so it will get plenty of limelight on your shelf. It's also so easy to pick up and play on the fly, it's a good one to have to fill in the gaps waiting for players to show up on game night or break out in a lull. I did see in the rules something about multiple games, I don't know what that was about, but games go so quickly, you could link them in a type of campaign. The only drawback I see is that it is, at its core, a card game, no bones about it. If you're cool with that, you may want to check it out.

Centaur Princess Chronicles, pt. 4

The Centaur Princess Chronicles

"There was a princess who lived in the forest. She was a centaur; half horse and half human. She wore her long, brown hair in thick braids and she had sparkling green eyes. She and her tribe were respectful of nature. Today was a special day because it was her birthday."

"It was the centaur princess' 16th birthday, which was special in her tribe. This meant that she was old enough to be considered a responsible adult. To prove this, she had to do a special quest. She got to pick what her quest would be."

"The centaur princess went to the oldest of the tribe, the wise woman. The wise woman was the keeper of the stories and she had many books in her hut. The two stayed up long in the night, reading about these legends by candlelight."

"There was a tale of old that spoke about an ice crown that belonged to a centaur queen. It was a very magical crown and all the best wizards helped to make it. There was an ogre; a large, terrible ogre warlock who was jealous and wanted the crown for himself."

New Lego Kingdoms Line

Rather than shamelessly borrow all of Kris Abel's Lego sneak peeks of the upcoming new medieval line, I'll just point you to his Tech Life blog over at CTV.

I'm always happy for new Legos, but I must say I'm more than a little disappointed that these new medieval sets are completely lacking any semblance of a fantasy element. I was really getting into the current Castle series and was hoping for more, say an Elven race, or maybe some Lizardmen or something. Oh well, at least these upcoming sets look great and don't have the associated goofiness some sets have had recently. I'm looking forward to them!

Pike and Shot: the Battle of Ceresole

The other night we played a historical game of Bob's as-yet unpublished Pike and Shot rules as part of his Might of Arms 2 playtest. Just the other week I got my own copy of the first Might of Arms rulebook, so I was eager to see the mechanics in action

again. Sinc Bob was playtesting these rules mind you, there was a considerable departure from my copy, but the gist was there, and I was long for the ride anyway. It was a good looking table.

From the title you might have guessed the genre. We played out the Battle of Ceresole, here's a blurb from Wikipedia: The Battle of Ceresole (or Cérisoles) was an encounter between a French army and the combined forces of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire during the Italian War of 1542–46. The lengthy engagement, which historian Bert Hall characterized as "marvelously confused", took place on April 11, 1544, outside the village of Ceresole d'Alba in the Piedmont region of Italy; the French, under François de Bourbon, Count of Enghien, defeated the Spanish-Imperial army of Alfonso d'Avalos d'Aquino, Marquis del Vasto.^[1] Despite having inflicted substantial casualties on the Imperial troops, the French subsequently failed to exploit their victory by taking Milan. -Wikipedia


The last time I asked Bob for a quick blurb about a game we played, less than a paragraph or so, he ended up giving me two pages worth! I didn't want to impose this time, and in classic Mik fashion as of late, my "game report" will be largely pictorial in nature!

I said the table was beautiful, and it was. There's just something to be said for seeing a hundred minis or so, arrayed out in nice infantry blocks, fully painted, and on good looking terrain. Andy was trying out his new terrain mat from the Terrain Guy, and it was very nice. It gave a good 'carpet' to battle on, and matched the flocked hills perfectly. Bob's armies, historical 15mm, were fully painted and seeing all those pikes were cool.


Steady!


I've said in the past I always do the 'unthinkable' on the table, making me the perfect play tester? Well I did it again, my two stands of skirmishers should have been dead or gone by this point in the game, but no, they were canny! They snuck around a huge pike block, they harassed some cavalry, then ran on and finally set their sights, literally, on the flank commander and his bodyguard. Well there really weren't any rules for such a thing, but they shot, then charged and engaged the enemy in melee. Bob devised rules on the fly, by the end of the battle he had some concrete ideas to deal with such a situation.


Clashing unite galore


Scads of troops


The slow crawl of my fatigued and shaken units



Some shots of the spectacle


Ken's troops



Furious fights break out everywhere


I pleaded for Andy to take this pic of my cannon lined up to shoot, but after the rolling the dice, I was completely off the mark and failed to cause any hits! Still, it was kind cool to look down the barrel, yell "fire", and see the cannonball arcing through the air.


This was my right flank, they didn't last too long!


Moments before the charge...


I didn't take notes during the battle, but I believe these are some of Ken's troops lined up with a couple of cannons. Bob and Ken were on the same side, and Andy and I took the other. My dice rolling was abysmal, but I still had a blast with the game. The flank I was responsible for got rolled up pretty well however, leaving Andy to shoulder most of the work. Kudos to both Bob and Ken for the win, it was a pretty decisive victory when the smoke cleared.


I've got to brag on Bob for a minute here. This was a medal he received for a game he ran recently at the Siege of Augusta. I didn't even think to ask what game he was running. We had practiced a fantasy scenario a couple of times, but that didn't make the cut. I don't know what did, but kudos to Bob with walking away with a realistic looking medal!

Goin' Rogue: A New Rogue Trader Blog

It's always a sad day when one of your best friends (and stalwart gaming buddies) moves out of town. A few years ago we all lost such an individual to another city, leaving many voids in his wake, one of which being in the game master department. Thanks to Al Gore and the invention of the intarweb though, we can still live vicariously through his latest exploits and what he and his new group are getting into. Not just us, but you too!

I've added 'Warrant of Trade' on the blogroll to the right, so go check it out. It will chronicle his Rogue Trader campaign, in both storyline, direction, and all the cool behind-the-scenes stuff that he's working on to keep it moving. If you like keeping up with sci-fi RPG campaigns, or are a 40k universe fan in general, this site's for you.

The Martians are Coming!!!

Next week we're doing a Martian-themed game night, stay tuned...

First Foray with Flying Lead

Ganesha Games' latest product, Flying Lead

"Flying Lead (written by Rich Jones and Andrea Sfiligoi, $8 pdf, 48 pages with two variant covers) can be used to play tabletop actions in a wide range of genres. From gang warfare to pulp action, from military operations to black-clad assassins, Flying Lead supplies furious fun at bullet speed! Lead a gang of mobsters, play cops vs crooks, or enter the brutal world of covert special operations and espionage. But will you have the guts to lead your force to glory in world where a street punk or an armed fanatic can blow you away as effectively as a trained soldier? Pick your force, roll those dice and find out!" -from the Ganesha Games website

We've had a blast playing Song of Blades and Heroes, admittedly though, we've only got three games under our belts, it's still one of those games that's fun to play and easy to grasp. Also, there is that sweet spot where you can use whatever the heck figs you want to. There's some good SBH reports to peruse here if you haven't already.

So now the same company comes out with Flying Lead, in the same vein as the Song of Blades, but applied to a gun-toting, modern genre. Many of the same mechanics apply, like quality of troops compared to what you need to roll on a d6 for actions. Hero activation and the like are also very similar. Instead of having a rune-axe toting Dwarf, you've got a 1920's mobster, or the like. With our first couple of games we went modern military.


The fictional desert town of Falujahstan

You know, I've actually got mixed feelings about doing modern military. I can't exactly pin it down, and I'm not adverse to it, but there's still a scratching at the back of my mind about it. Never thought about it before, but then again, I've never gamed "true modern military" before either. Maybe that's why I'm kinda adverse to Flames of War?

Anyway, we used Andy's collection of 20mm US troops and 'middle eastern' insurgents. The rule book has stats for Army Rangers, which is what we used here, and I'm not sure what the opposing force was statted out with. The figs looked great, the scale is a good mix between 'tiny' and 'heroic' and, as always, Andy has slapped good paint on 'em.


The "parking lot"


Insurgent forces

Chrispy and I played one another in the first game while Andy adjudicated the rules. After a couple of turns though, it all came back to me just from what exposure I had with SBH. There's some obvious big changes, namely the heavy reliance on ranged weaponry, but you can still use the range counters used in SBH. It was a disaster for my side. Bad rolls will spell your doom any day of the week on the tabletop, but using them as an excuse is equally bad. For whatever reason though, I had my left flank decimated. I couldn't pass any activation rolls, I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with full-auto rifles, it was sad.


The town center


Corporal McIntyre

We may have been testing the rules, but I was done and conceded the game, I guess about halfway through. Andy jumped out of his seat, bravado to the brim, accused me of being "outplayed" and valiantly took over. I say this all in jest of course, but he did take over. And accuse me of being outplayed. He fared better than I, consolidating troops and not taking as many risks with activation rolls. US troops had rolled up one flank already and were getting dug in for the long haul to hold the center of the table.


Opening fire at close range


Insurgents advance around an oil tower

In the second game I took Andy head on, he stuck with the insurgents and I commanded the US troops. I tried to move up the middle quickly and get some nice lanes of fire laid out while sticking to cover. One unit was able to storm a building and set up overwatch from a rooftop. The other unit though got chewed up pretty badly while taking cover behind the plaza's fountain. I learned from mistakes in the first game, but honestly, having better quality troops went a long way, it felt I was able to "do more stuff".


US troops hunker down on a rooftop


Troops advance down excellent hills from theTerrainGuy.com

The rules were fast and fun, I'll play them again. Having played SBH helped out a lot more than I thought it would, but it's not necessary, I think you'll pick it up in one game or less regardless. For a mere eight bucks you get the PDF and it's money well spent. We played squad-based military ops, but you can do pretty much anything that involves guns. There's rules for World War II, mobsters, pulp, near-future, and everything in between. There's even stats for Stargate type operations, cleverly titled "Star Portal". I tell you, there's something very appealing about running a modern A-Team type scenario...


"Get through that window trooper, pronto!"

Marching Middle Earth

You just might be a geek if...

One of my favorite podcasts, Fear the Boot, has dedicated their last couple of episodes to "gamer health". I am a prime candidate for needing the talk about the birds, the bees, and the clogged arteries. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but I'm a "tad" out of shape. If you click some of my 'personal' posts, you'll maybe see pics of me, it's a gaming blog, but I still make some cameos. 'Carrying my weight well' is little consolation, I'm 5'6" but weigh in at 220 pounds. If I offend anyone by saying I have a "solid gamer body", sorry.

Let's face it, ours is a most sedentary hobby. We sit for hours painting, we sit for hours playing games, and usually (especially with the latter) we accompany all that sitting around with junk food, soft drinks, and high caloric adult beverages. Not a whole lot of physical activity in gaming. Of course the young have metabolism and time on their hands, married family gamers, not so much. I'm not calling anyone out but myself here. If you're a chubby gamer, great. Also, there's always those who run marathons and 40k tournaments, have six children, and work two full time jobs. That's awesome. Really awesome. That's not me though.

We've got a treadmill in the garage, and it's pretty boring. I mean, it's a freakin' treadmill, come on already. In the winter time there's little other outlet though, you can't go for a jog around the blog when it's thirty degrees and raining. So this week I thought I'd do something. My wife uses the treadmill during the cold months, and she's in shape, so it must work, right? To cure the boredom I heard about something called the Eowyn Challenge...


Basically this author, Karen W. Fonstad of the Middle-Earth Atlas, has painstakingly charted the foot journeys of the heroes in the books. Tolkien was also pretty OCD about these things as well, so Fonstad had good data to work with. She's measured out the distances in miles, and basically you just track your progress compared to the chart. Easy enough, and you have goals and benchmarks to work with. There's a "total miles" number, but also milestones big and small along the way that the characters in the books encountered.

The first trek I'm undergoing is the Hobbiton to Rivendell journey, setting out at a whopping 458 miles. As you can see from the link, some little markers include leaving the front gate of Hobbiton at mile marker one, but get detailed all the way through the list. Mile marker 32 for instance is when Sam and Frodo hide from the Black Rider on the road. These of course have been thoroughly checked and double checked with the novels.

So the bottom line is I'm going to have to get in shape, getting on the treadmill is the best bet right now. Sure I could eat healthier, but where's the fun in that? If I've got to grind through miles anyway, I may as well geek out to boot with some Middle Earth "goals". On the right hand column here on the blog I've added a little mile marker box to track my progress. As you can see I've left Bag End, and am heading south on the lane towards the plank bridge over the water. Okay, I admit, it's not a lot of progress, but it's still a start!

Also I find walking on the treadmill is a good time to listen to podcasts, such as the aforementioned Fear the Boot. Speaking of all those gaming podcasts out there, have you checked out the Minions of the Monster Master yet? If not, you should!

Centaur Princess Chronicles, pt. 3

The Centaur Princess Chronicles

"There was a princess who lived in the forest. She was a centaur; half horse and half human. She wore her long, brown hair in thick braids and she had sparkling green eyes. She and her tribe were respectful of nature. Today was a special day because it was her birthday."

"It was the centaur princess' 16th birthday, which was special in her tribe. This meant that she was old enough to be considered a responsible adult. To prove this, she had to do a special quest. She got to pick what her quest would be."

"The centaur princess went to the oldest of the tribe, the wise woman. The wise woman was the keeper of the stories and she had many books in her hut. The two stayed up long in the night, reading about these legends by candlelight."

500th Post!

Wow, 500 posts, seems like a lot doesn't it? Thanks for the support!

Boddingtons Pub Ale

The other night we took a break from tabletop gaming and went into boardgame mode, I brought along a four pack of Boddington’s Pub Ale, which I haven't had in quite some time. I haven't written a beer review in a while either, so here you go.

The cans have the little air-bubble compressed sphere thingie [edit: the "thingie" is actually called a 'wdiget', thanks kelvingreen] in them to simulate the hand-drawn English pub pouring style and it's what gives the ale such a smooth, creamy consistency and flavor. I drank them out of the cans, but I suppose the correct way is to pour it into a pint glass and let it settle for about ten minutes. This will also give it the proper time to warm up a bit, since it's not to be served ice cold. Be careful opening the can! It will explode in a shower of foam if handled carelessly. Andy had a great quote, but I don't want to bug him as of this writing to ask what it was.

Boddingtons is definitely a archetypical English Ale, if you're not a fan of these, you may be a little disappointed. It lacks the "explosion" of hops and malts, but it does provide a mellow, smooth taste that is consistent from first sip to last. There are blogs out there dedicated to reviewing tasty brews, for me, I'm not so technical. If you're looking for a smoky, Guinness type ale, this may not be for you, nor is is a Newcastle Brown Ale. We also had the those (the latter) on hand, and they were good mind you, but still different enough from the Boddingtons to not be able to draw a direct comparison. Boddingtons has a unique, mellow flavor that provides a rich, full taste. It's the perfect game night brew.