The Mayor of Newcastle

After playtesting the High Plains Drifter PKowboys variant the other night we played a follow-up game. There were a good number of tweaks and changes we made to it, and they all seemed to work out rather well. The point of HPD is to speed of PKowboys while still keeping the essence of what makes PKowboys a great game to begin with. The point of our changes were to streamline this even more.


For this game we tried a bit more of a storyline scenario; the bad guys had the mayor of the town of Newcastle holed up in the jail. The good guys, who had been run out of town, have returned with reinforcements to save the mayor, liberate the town, and cut down the bad guys.


There's a new livery in town...and fences!

The good guys were able to get in there, smoke out the bad guys, and rescue the mayor. It was touch and go for a while, but after a couple of foes went down, the good guys were able to assault the sheriff's office en masse.

The rules went a lot smoother this time around, with the only discussion points or hiccups revolved around Piquet-specific terms and items that still linger in the rules for no other reason than "they've always been in there". Not being a dedicated-Piquet rules group however, these don't hold much water.

The High Plains Drifter (now double) modified rules work great and drive the game faster than before while losing none of the charm of the game itself. The downfall being that one-shot games are about all the mileage you'll be getting with them. Sure, in the works are extended rules for campaign play, and experience tracking, and what-not but why reinvent the wheel when games like Rules With No Name and Legends of the Old West already have those in spades?

Speaking of Legends of the Old West, my order of cowboy figs is in (six mounted, six foot) and hopefully we'll be getting some games under our belts with these. I do foresee lots of Cowboy content showing their hide 'round these parts.