Well, the Lardies are at it again with a new rule set with "What a Cowboy!". Not surprising given the title, it is a variation on the popular "What a Tanker!" style of rules. As the original set has been popular, WillB, invited GordC, CraigM, and myself (to complete the alphabetization, DougH if you haven't already known) to a game set in the Canadian frontier during the same time as the ubiquitous "wild west" was occurring in the United States. Rather than sheriffs, marshals, or rangers, we had the NWMP, the North West Mounted Police, which handled the duties in the western part of the country. By the turn of the century it will merge with the police forces of most of the eastern provinces to form the famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police. [ as an aside, they recently provided King Charles with one of their specially bred black horses ]
WillB's scenario had the boys in red serge defending a trapper previously arrested from a rescue party of friends. The action can be seen on WillB's blog link .
GordC and myself did the service proud as our policemen successfully defended the accused - and ourselves truth be told as the trappers did not care about the welfare of our boys in red - and shot two of the scoundrels at which point the others, and presumably the moose, left in haste.
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| Sgt. King uses a chair as cover while waiting for other trappers to come into line of sight. One of the trappers is already dead near the creek. |
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| Constable Fraser doing stellar service with his pistol. His slight flesh wound would be only any of the Mounties would take during the game. Figures and terrain by the host WillB. |
We were all very pleased about the rules and thinking it was a better "feel" than its WaT 'father'. In other words, the action dice worked much better as an individual skirmish game than a tank command surprisingly. As many of us have MANY different gunslinger shootist rules and had no satisfaction with any (I have one which is some 86 pages long!), and being a style to which we are very familiar we picked up on this quickly. While we did keep it simple for our first go at it, we did have a "Bonanza" occurrence, an allowance to break the current players turn to do an abbreviated action which is a neat twist.... my Sgt. King character used it to put a lucky hole into one of the trappers with his winchester rifle). The rules have many more additions for characterization (and role-playing...) and as many of tabletop games now are getting smaller and, frankly, shorter in duration, this style of game will be popular.
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