Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

As you may have noticed I haven’t been posting as much. Generally I’ve been busy with socializing, playing a couple other tabletop games, and plenty of computering. I did get a Dinosaur Cowboys battle in a couple days ago and I hope to have the pictures and report posted soon (Update: battle report posted). I got to use my new model cacti for it and the plastic Litko tokens looked as great as ever (it was only their second outing).

Computer News
To deviate a bit from the usual wild west with lasers topic, here’s some of what has been taking my time. Good ol’ Diablo 3:

As you can see I eventually did pass Inferno difficulty (at the tasteful hour of 9pm to boot!) so achieving that has really cut back on my playtime, thankfully. Still sunk 80+ hours into my Barbarian and another 60 into my DH (before I abandoned her).

Then the Steam Summer Sale happened, which I didn’t go too wild for. I picked up Space Pirates and Zombies (SPAZ) and Magicka. I actually bought 4 copies of Magicka (for $7.50…thanks sale!) so I can play it coop with my friends. It’s a fun game of combining magical elements to craft spells on the fly. There is full friendly fire so half the time you blow up allies with fireballs and stuff. A little buggy and prone to crashing every now and then, but it’s still a hoot.
SPAZ is because, aside from dinosaurs and cowboys, I really love space games. Sort of a Masters of Orion, Star Control 2, and Traveller mix. The game is very fun with a big random universe to traverse and fight in. A couple of screenshots, again to reinforce how non-DC related this post is :)

Tabletop News
In terms of non-computer stuff there have been a few exciting items. The most exciting news (to me at least) is the old spaceship dogfighting game called Silent Death is revamping their rules. I’m a dedicated fan so it’s been hard to see the company struggle and switch hands so much. They have a terrific ruleset for small scale dogfights on a hex starmap so I’ll be interested to see what changes they do. Regardless it’s just nice to have the PDFs for sale again. I have a growing collection of their miniatures and really enjoy the game anytime I get a chance to play. In fact the early versions of Dinosaur Cowboys tried to use the same Damage Track mechanism from SD for managing dinosaur health. That’s how much I love it!

Seriously if that second picture doesn’t evoke any imaginative rumblings in your brain you must not like fun! I mean, aside from the kitchen table sort of wrecking the shot.

The second is Warhammer 40,000 released their 6th edition rulebook. For the briefest moment I had a glimmer of hope that the rules would be rewritten from the ground up. No more ancient statline pulled from Warhammer fantasy, or clunky UGO-IGO mechanisms. There was even a leaked version way, way back where people said the designers were “free to go wild” that had tons of exciting ideas, but unfortunately they went with a more traditional and incremental approach. Understandable for your flagship product, but sometimes I wish they’d release a Specialist Game in the 40k universe to get a change of pace beyond Warhammer. On the upside they added random charge distances, just like Dinosaur Cowboys! Such copycats :)