Thor's Day Hero: Brisco County Junior

This was a tough call, do I include Brisco County Junior, or just throw Bruce Campbell under the Thor's Day Hero bus as a catch-all. In the end, as you may have guessed, I went with the dashing Harvard graduate turned bounty hunter.

The Adventures of Brisco County Junior was a great show, and in rare cross-genre genius it was two equal parts science fiction and western, with a pinch of steampunk thrown in for good measure. With Campbell at the helm, the jokes were fluid and plentiful. The action was pretty good, the sci-fi elements neat, and the whole affair was rolled up into a burrito well worth dining on. So welcome aboard Brisco, sorry we couldn't make room for Comet.

My Gutshot Con-Game

Hey, that looks official!

I can't really say "I" ran my first game of Gutshot, as last mentioned here. I borrowed all of my buddy Andy's excellent Whitewash City terrain, and my other buddy Chrispy was also on hand to help out with the rules, bring some more terrain (including cool terrain mat), and even cooler action markers. My name was attached to the table though, but of course it wouldn't have even had a chance without my friends pitching in.


There were four players signed up, each person getting two characters. Frankly the game could've handled a whopping ten, but each person would only run one character each. There's a ton of great resources on the official Gutshot page, including a bunch of pre-generated characters ranging from shopkeepers and gamblers to bounty hunters and Texas rangers.


Before the game began we rolled randomly for characters, which yielded a pretty good mix of characters across the board. Skill levels are determined by the target number (TN) of the character. Starting with the lowest skilled TN's, players got to dive into a bin full of LEGO pieces and build their characters. This also yielded a lot of fun results, and got the players invested right off the bat into the game.


Every turn each character gets three actions, but these actions are random each turn (names drawn out of a hat). This makes for a very fun game 'cause you know you'll get your three actions each turn, you just don't know when!


Another thing I like about the Gutshot rules is that you don't play unless your character has a name and if that name isn't suitably "cowboy/western" it doesn't count! In case you were wondering, "the Man with no Name" also counts as a name.


Ammo is tracked in game, and if you're empty you're going to waste valuable actions later on down the road reloading. But why reload when there's perfectly good (and loaded!) weapons just laying around for the taking! Oh, and you can "fan" your revolvers too, so expect to run empty quite a bit.


As all good western tales should go, the final actions of the game were decided on in the center of the town, probably at high noon to boot. Interestingly enough, the solid TN characters like the Texas Ranger had good longevity, but it came down to a low-skilled townsfolk running around shooting everyone at point-blank with a shotgun that won the day.


Sure, you could do slips of paper, but this is a cowboy game! We used spent .45 Long Colt cartridges to track character actions, drawn out of a small bag. Drawing these out of a cowboy hat would be even cooler, maybe next time.

All in all, I love Gutshot. It plays fast and loose but guarantees a good time had by all. The rules are great for long term play and offer plenty of details, as much as you want. They can also be played simple, like we did here, making it a great pick-up or low-prep game.

I've never run a con game before and I was pretty nervous leading into it, but once people started building their figures and having fun, I started having fun as well and forgot all about my nervousness. I would definitely run this game again if given the chance.

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.

PKowboys Variant Playtest

Tuco and Rafael emerged from two days in the desert upon the unsuspecting town of [insert clever western town name here]. Between the two of them a machete, a lever-action rifle, and a terrible thirst were all they owned.

Little did the duo know that a pair of cow-hands had just arrived as well on the other side of town. A herd the two brothers had just spent their life savings on had died of Blackleg and the bank refused to refund their money. They would have what's rightfully theirs, one way or another.


During my "pre-blog" period we played a lot PKowboys, the Piquet rules variant that covers the wild west. We managed to get in one weekend of it a couple years ago, reported here. It's a good game, I don't need to go on about here suffice it say you use random action cards and it creates an unpredictable, but extremely fun game where cowboys, outlaws, and townsfolk are shooting each other up and painting the town red.

About four years ago a set of rules were written up as a "highly modified" variant of PKowboys called High Plains Drifter. They provide greater detail where needed, speed up some of the action as needed, and have a neat little "action counter" component where you pre-decide what your character intends to do and then hope they can still do it after the dust settles. I should point out that High Plains Drifter is not intended to be published or distributed. Here's a direct quote from the author that sums up what they're all about:

"There are huge differences between PKowboys and HPD. Actually there
is nothing similar about them except for some of the card names.

HPD is my attempt at writing skirmish rules the way I envision
skirmish, 1 on 1, combat. The requirements for my skirmish rules are
as follows.

1. Must play very fast compared to rules on the market today.
2. Little or no down-time for players. Skirmish games need to be high
[octane] and players need to be always thinking about their next
tactics.
3. Game rewards folks that can think on their feet.
4. Has to be Fun!
5. Can lend itself to a campaign.
6. High drama.

I think HPD fits these criteria. HPD was intended for my club's
personal use, but after Historicon Jeff (PK Skirmish author) thought
he could use some of the ideas from HPD in PK Skirmish. So HPD is
still for personal use, but I will give it to PK Inc to take whatever
ideas they like and put them into PK Skirmish." -E. Burgess

We've had a lot of fun with Gutshot in the past, and sort of recently I picked up the Rules With No Name (which good a lot of good reviews). Andy has the Warhammer historicals lineup, and we always have the original PKowboys to fall back on...so we're not hurting on cowboy rules at all. It is nice to try something a little new and different at the same time.

The game we played here, three players running two characters each, was a run-through for a larger follow-up game two days later. That next game is in the future as I write this, but in the past as this is posted...confusing, I know, but it means I should have the follow-up game written up and ready to post for you very soon.

HPD was fun, but as to being "hugely" different from PKowboys, I didn't see it. Then again I'm usually not big on details. It was solid, but seems exactly like what it was; a modified PKowboy game, nothing wrong with that. For long term cowboy shoot 'em ups I'd like to spend some serious time with Rules With No Name (hey, they're free!) and Gutshot (hey, it's cheap!) only because I feel they give a great variety of cowboy-ness between the two of them on the tabletop and each one deserves its legitimate shot at longevity. Really, having read through the Warhammer Historical Legends of the Old West, I'm sold, I just can't find a copy anywhere!

Looks like my "minis bought" stat is about to increase... [EDIT: Actually it just did, by twelve. I picked up three Cowboy Wars packs, more on those later!]

Shootout at Sundown Ridge

It has been a while since we played Gutshot around these parts, but it seems Cowboy gamin' is on the upswing right now. There's a locally organized gaming con coming up next month and I've volunteered to run Gutshot there, so to get some practice for that we broke out the terrain and since I don't have any painted cowboys at the moment so I opted for some Lego figs (of course). There will be a Lego Thursday at one point detailing the figs themselves.

An unseen native scout observes the townsfolk below

In Gutshot you can pretty much play with just one character per player, which is one of the main draws to running it as a con game, you can play up to ten people with no problems. Combat isn't so deadly where you're going to die off too quickly, and there's plenty of detail on your character sheet to keep you focused and with your head in the game.


Surreal normally wouldn't be the proper term normally, but in a gaming sense, yeah it was a bit surreal. The Legos were a sharp contrast to the tabletop terrain and made for a neat overall setting. It was super-populated, with tons of NPCs and lots of random horse, even some livestock. We treated the bystanders as "portable cover", which was helped along by Gutshot's rule of near misses.

If you miss your intended target, and there's someone within an inch of said target, well, collateral damage occurs. I've been watching a lot of western movies (mostly old but some new) lately and this almost rarely happens so it's interesting to see in Gutshot.


The player characters are mounted on larger, display type bases but the bystanders were equipped differently. Originally I had envisioned a bunch of random actions of the civilians and what-not running around. It was quickly determined that this would only bog the game down quite a bit, so the random NPC movement got canned.

NPCs on yellow bases are, well, yellow. Each turn when their activation would've come up they would have randomly moved for cover, or a marshal, or the like. Those on black bases were just regular folk, they'd just move regular I guess. Ahem, as you can see I didn't fully flesh out the random NPC movement thingie. Last are those on red bases (red for danger!) and their activations would center around making attacks, usually ranged, on those PCs that are closest to them. Even writing all of this sounds complicated!

Never bring a knife to a shovel fight!

Here the "Thug" (high ground with the poncho and the knife) dukes it out with the "Sodbuster" character, who was given the shovel as an afterthought. I really like melee in Gutshot, the shooting and what-not are solid but nothing spectacular, but it's the fisticuffs that stand out for me. Instead of just making an attack you choose what kind of attack you want to do, whether it's a jab punch, a long punch, a backhand, what-have-you.

Each type of attack comes with its own target number, and each attack deals specific damage. So a backhand might be easy to perform, so it has a low target number. The catch is it's just a backhand, so it is going to do little damage. A kick on the other hand is going to do a lot of damage to your target, but it's going to be the hardest type of attack to pull off.

"Marshal! You've got to protect me, not use me for cover!"

Homesteaders...can't live with them, can't live without 'em

The dual-wielding Texas Ranger stalks his target across the pen...

...and brings the Gambler down

It was a fun game for sure, and although the rules are easy to pick up on the fly we still had to some learning on the fly as well. If you're looking for a good skirmish game set in the wild west, I'd strongly suggest Gutshot. It's good for pick up games, spontaneous games, and the like. Not to mention the book itself is quite an enjoyable read with lots of side text and other fun nuggets about six-gun life west of the mighty Mississippi.