Misc., Wild West, Legends of the Old West, 28mm

Once every few months a few of us get together for a weekend game – a large multi-player affair. Well, this one was a Wild West shootout, with eight different gangs, fighting through the sizeable town of Red Rock and its neighbouring Mexican village. My crowd were the hard-pressed lawmen, but their home town was visited by a host of others – rampaging cowboys, outlaws, a Chinese Tong band, Mexican bandits, Navaho Indians, Mountain Men, the US Cavalry and even the Texas Rangers. Actually, there was very little point to it all apart from blazing away at everyone else, although the organiser Colin Jack tried his best. Buildings were ransacked for booty, a treasure trove was searched for, cattle were rustled, stagecoaches and mule trains waylaid, and various strangers passed through looking for a fight – most notably Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. That’s my lawmen in action below – and a mean bunch they look too, despite the primitive state of frontier photography available at the time….While I’ll be the first to agree this isn’t proper wargaming, it was still a harmless enough way to spend a day with a bunch of friends, even though you can’t trust them not to shoot you in the back. The rules we used were the Warhammer “Historical” set Legends of the Old West, which are pretty flaky, and involve a lot of die rolling for little enough result, but at least they were fairly straightforward, and even city slickers and folks from back east managed to pick it up without any problem.Still, fun though it was, I’d sooner have played a real wargame, with armies, and units, and pretty flags ….

Tags: Legends of the Old West