An afternoon in the Wild West

Finally we had a trial game with my little side project for the year, The Wild West using Dead mans Hand rules. We simply used 5 men aside with one gang of  outlaws and the other Law men and played a shoot out down town scenario with a very simple objective of killing the other gang! 

The outlaws approach the town with caution

We quickly started to get to grips with the rules (although I did make one or two mistakes during this game which I realised when I read the rules afterwards). Once we got used to the card system of the rules which is new to our style of gaming, we both had fun playing out a good old western shoot em! 

The bullets start to fly around the town

A lawmen deputy is attacked by two outlaw dudes!

We didn't use any of the special rules for the gangs and only had our men armed with pistols and one rifle, also we only used three cards in our 'playing hand', this was to keep the game as simple as possible. It was amazing how many times during the game both my dad and I rolled a 1 on a d20 when shooting meaning our weapon was jammed or out of ammo. It was also fun when we would play  a card from our playing hand, on a couple of occasions this really messed up our plans of action for that phase, none more so than when was going to use all three of my actions to recover the three hits on my outlaw, my dad played a card from his  hand which made me fall back instead and all my actions were lost, needless to say my outlaw was KIA shortly afterwards.

The Marshall had shot down a outlaw but is shot dead out right by the outlaw gunslinger

The shoot out spreads all over the town

In the end my sole surving gunslinger held is nerve long enough to see the last two lawmen jump on their horses and get out of town, so victory for the bad guys this time round. Next time we will both pick our own gangs and have a go at the campaign series which was supplied in the Rulebook. Overall view was a positive one and a think it will be a welcome break from wargaming large battles most weeks..until next time partner 😄

A barroom brawl saw a outlaw dude kill the deputy before he himself was shot dead from a near by building window

The final scenes at the end of the shootout