Blast from the past -- Bounty Hunter

Picked up a copy of Bounty Hunter: Shootout at the Saloon today for $5.

This is another in the series of groundbreaking picture combat books designed by Alfred Leonardi in the 1980s. Other examples include the Ace of Aces series and Lost Worlds series. These were "first person shooters" long before the video game era.

I used to have a copy of Bounty Hunter, but lost it somewhere along the line. While I liked the game, I wasn't such a big fan that I wanted to spend a lot of time tracking down a replacement copy -- but when a copy in excellent condition showed up at a local store for just $5 I went ahead and grabbed it.

The game is probably the most elaborate of the picture books, with a very detailed shot location procedure, but is also perhaps one of the more limited ones. Unlike Lost Worlds and Ace of Aces, where the players are only concerned with their relative positions, in Bounty Hunter the characters move around in the context of a fixed battlefield (the Saloon) and there are necessarily a limited number of locations in play (fifteen). Also unlike Lost Worlds with its dozens of character books and Ace of Aces with dozens of different aircraft in four different World War I book sets, Bounty Hunter has just the two characters. Apparently a second set was designed (there are references in the first set to possible expansions) but the artwork was lost and Leonardi didn't think redoing all the work was worth it.

Still, there are some interesting ideas in the game, as I recall, and I'm glad to add it back to my collection.

Cowboys: The Way of the Gun brief comparison to AH Gunslinger

Cowboys: the Way of the Gun inaugurated Worthington Games' new euro-style production standards last year. It has a nice, sturdy box, thick cardboard counters and boards and a slick rulebook.

The game itself is a very euro-ized conflict game that's somewhat reminiscent of the old Avalon Hill Gunslinger game on the same topic.

Like Gunslinger the game features full color double sides mapboards depicting typical western town and countryside terrain. Both game used cards, although in different ways and both games are focused on the actions of individual characters in a historical Old American West setting flavored with some strong Hollywood elements. Both games even include some of the same historical incidents as scenarios.

Gunslinger, however, was a game published by a wargame company during the height of the most grognard phase of the hobby. The game documents every possible physical action in painstaking detail, tracking events in .4 second increments. The game characters have extensive special abilities and differentiation and, in many ways, Gunslinger is a pseudo-RPG. Because of its detail Gunslinger is a really absorbing game that has many devoted fans to this day, although it's been out of print for decades. But it takes a long time to play. A street gunfight that will be over in half a minute in game time will take a whole evening to play.

Cowboys, in its basic game, strips away all that detail and operates at a very crude level with minimal details. Whereas in Gunslinger a player character could be prone behind a water trough and literally just stick his head out to see, in Cowboys the characters are basically just standing there. In Gunslinger dozens of different firearms are depicted in loving detail with different ammunition types, different impact effects, different reliability and many other distinctions. In Cowboys there are just three kinds of firearms: pistols, rifles and shotguns.

On the other hand, a game of Cowboys will pass by in less than an hour, capturing the quickness of a skirmish better.

While cards were central to Gunslinger, providing both movement control and random events, Cowboys uses dice to resolve firring and the cards basically provide some special abilities.

Gunslinger is strictly focused on the individual gunfighter, and is really best played with each player controlling a single character or maybe two. Cowboys is actually more of a tactical step higher, being primarily concerned with the actions of a whole party. In military terms the Gunslinger player represents the soldier while the Cowboys player represents the fire team or squad leader.

For what it does, Cowboys is successful, providing a very quick-playing man-to-man western gunfight game, but many players will be tempted to add more detail. There are some optional rules in the book and a set of advanced rules that add more detail and options to the game.

I don't think any Gunslinger fans will think that Cowboys replaces the older game, but it provides a good supplement and one that's probably easier to bring to the table in this day and age.

Bang! and the mythology of the Old West

The "Old West" of American history is one of the more remarkable episodes of cultural myth-making in human history. The height of the era is generally considered to last from the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the 20th Century, although the entire story of Manifest Destiny and the settlement of North America naturally took longer.

The Old West plays a big role in the self-image of Americans and its image abroad and holds a continued fascination here and overseas. Despite only lasting a few decades in real life, the Old West has proven to be an inexhaustible source for storytelling for more than a century.

One of the most unusual characteristics of the Old West's mythology is that the myth-making was contemporaneous with the historical events. Even as settlers poured west dime novels chronicled their adventures in fictionalized form and actual people often featured in the stories. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody actually organized a hugely popular travelling show in the late 1800s that included famous folks from the Old West such as Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull. His Wild West show even performed in Europe "before the crowned heads." Perhaps Cody's show explains the continuing European interest in the period.

It's ironic that so much of the myth-making is centered around the lawlessness of the frontier. Indeed, many of the most notorious characters were simple criminals, members of nothing more romantic than a gang. Murder and robbery figure prominently and violence was common. When there wasn't civil violence to contend with there were constant flareups between Indians and settlers as they native population was inexorably pushed back.

The whole era is obviously a fertile one for conflict games, and there have been some notable ones over the years. While there aren't an overwhelming number of game titles with Old West themes, many of those that have appeared are quite popular.

Although based on actual historical events, it seems that games about the Old West can't escape the influence of the mythology. Although published by a wargame company, for example, Gunslinger admittedly includes a lot of Hollywood and dime novel style aspects. Yet Gunslinger's wargame roots keep it pretty close to the real thing. The recent Cowboys seems to aim to be a Gunslinger Lite, and very much in the tradition of man-to-man skirmish wargames.

At the other extreme, the Munchkin-series card game The Good, The Bad and the Munchkin just tacks Old West terms onto the tried and true RPG-based "Dungeon Crawl" game. It's mildly amusing but still a pretty big stretch.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the American Old West is global culture is the prominent role played by Italian filmmakers in its interpretation with the famous "spaghetti Westerns."

So it shouldn't be any surprise that an Italian game designer created a card game based on the Old West that capitalized on that tradition to create something that's turned out to be a big winner.

Bang! doesn't show much resemblance to the actual Old West, but it does capture a lot of the flavor of the Old West as seen through the lens of Spaghetti Western directors and it ends up being a loving depiction of that genre.

Gunslinger as a "nanotactical" game

The passing of Gary Gygax this week prompted me to think about how profound an impact D&D and RPGs generally had on wargaming, especially in the 70s and 80s.
For example, Avalon Hill's Gunslinger has RPG elements permeating the whole game. It was designed and published by a wargame company, designed by wargame designers and mostly played by wargamers. It's definitely a combat-oriented game, but of a sort rarely seen.
Not just a man-to-man skirmish game of microtactical combat, Gunslinger dips down into a "nanotactical" level of detail.
While in most skirmish-level wargames the player commands a small group of combatants, say a squad or platoon, in Gunslinger the player concerns himself with the placement and actions of particular body parts. Want to see around a corner? You stick your head out. Want to pick up a money bag? You have to decide which hand to pick it up with. Hit by a bullet? You have to see exactly where you got hit.
Each bullet is tracked. It matters whether your cartridges were loaded yourself or store-bought. If you get hit by a .32 caliber pistol and it doesn't kill you outright, you'll probably still be able to fight. Get hit by a .50 caliber buffalo gun slug and even if you're nicked in the leg you'll probably be mortally wounded and doomed to flop around a bit before slowly expiring.
Gunslinger is an intensely personal level of combat that was really pioneered by role-playing games. In RPGs a player normally controlled one character, which is also the best way to play Gunslinger, although it was possible in both RPGs and Gunslinger to handle two or three characters. Still, this is a far cry from the 8-man squad in Ambush! or the dozen or so in Cry Havoc!.
Gunslinger is pretty intense for a board game, which probably explains why it tends to have devoted fans, although it was never a breakaway hit. Like RPGs, Gunslinger pays the biggest dividend when you devote a lot of time to it. Our game group in the 1980s had a regular campaign going and Gunslinger hit the table regularly, at least once a month.
Gunslinger was still, in the end, a board game, however. Unlike the open-ended play of RPGs, Gunslinger was bounded by scenarios and victory conditions. While each character was well-defined in game terms, that definition came from the game designers, not just the players. Floozy, Ling Ho and Sodbuster were colorful characters, but they belonged to the game, not the players.
An interesting experiment, Gunslinger was never really followed up. The new game Cowboys, The Way Of The Gun, for example, is much more of a board wargame in approach. The individual fighters act and react in broad strokes. They move and they shoot. That's about it.
In Gunslinger you can crawl through the dust, poke your head around the corner of the saloon, draw your cap-and-ball revolver and calmly draw a bead on your dastardly foe behind the water trough while praying that the darn gun doesn't misfire when you pull the trigger.
Now that's a game.