Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

Recap of 4-Player Battle
Well yesterday I played a nice lengthy 4-player free-for-all game of Dinosaur Cowboys using the latest v1.9 rules. Unfortunately no pictures.
We introduced a new player to the game, and they seemed to take to it well enough. In terms of setup we used a 5’x4′ table, so a bit bigger than usual. There were some dinosaur eggs scattered across the middle line (giving +1 DEF to all entities within 3″) as well as each posse putting an additional dinosaur egg somewhere in their deployment zone. The idea was to try to motivate people to move to the center and not camp, but that ended up not being necessary since everyone was in for a big firefight. Each posse deployed in a 10″ square in their respective corners, and we started the game.

The posses involved were:
Nathan playing Crevan’s Outriders, a posse he designed that focuses on a low number of high quality troops. Nathan has helped me a bunch with brainstorming a lot of the objective and deployment rules as well as general help leading up to the v1.9 release.
Timmy playing Tribe of the Blood Pact, an old posse that I revamped for v1.9. They are melee focused which hurt him a bit in the showdown. Timmy had played once before a few revisions ago.
Paul playing Drylands Hunting Party who are basically a current version of the posse I use in the Windy River campaign, so they tend to be fairly versatile. He was the new player.
I was playing The Death Snakes, who you might remember from the old Across the Street battle report. They of course have been updated for v1.9 as well.

(From Interfacelift, alas horses instead of dinos)

Nathan took the north west corner, Paul the north east. I went south west and Timmy was south east. Basically the board split into two firefights, with my Terror (fully mounted with everyone in the posse) rushing east towards Timmy. Meanwhile Nathan and Paul maneuvered their snipers towards each other. Timmy eventually mounted up with everyone on his Plated dinosaur and headed to meet me.
The south was a big messy melee, but I was able to dismount my characters while Timmy kept them on the Plated, which meant he was basically losing Actions since his big, burdened dinosaur activated as a single entity. Eventually I was able to overcome his posse, but he took my Terror down to 4 HP.
Up north Paul started strong but eventually lose the momentum due to Nathan’s extensive use of some line-of-sight blocking cover to fire and then duck back into safety. Paul also was uncertain about committing his fragile Runner dinosaur to try to shut down Nathan’s snipers.
Eventually I headed north with the rest of my scattered forces, who got peppered on the way in as Nathan and Paul allied to face my fresher force (I had two characters with their full 16 HP). Paul eventually shot Nathan’s leader in the back, which threw a wrench into their allegiance.
As the battle wound down we ended up in a situation where Kallas of The Death Snakes (me) and Mirax of Crevan’s Outriders (Nathan) had empty guns and were within Charge range of Quidel of Drylands Hunting Party (Paul). So we both Charged in with Brawl type Kick and Punch attacks. This turned into a big fisticuff match until Paul eventually swung his sniper Trista in and shot Nathan down. Seeing that the fist fight was over I killed his Leader with Jordana who was approaching.
Then a big cat and mouse game ensued between the only three survivors of the grand battle: Trista (Drylands), and Kallas and Jordana (Death Snakes). Eventually we headed back south on the board, and had some crazy rolls. Paul rolled 3 Critical Hits with Trista against Jordana. So his 3A-4D weapon did a smoking 10 damage. Kallas moved around the hill Trista was by and replied with 2 Critical Hits of his own, which turned his 2A-5D Double Barrel Shotgun into a 9 damage killer. The last survivor was Kallas, with 8 HP (after having two Small IRP’s used on him).

Fixes and Changes
As a result of the game there were a few “duh” changes I made to the v1.9 rules, since (as usual) actually playing the game exposed some issues that weren’t obvious from reading the rules.

– Changed the Posse roster to use the abbreviations for each stat. The main reason for this was there was “Range” (for Range Target Number) BUT also “Range” for the weapon range. This was very confusing. Hopefully now by going to “RTN” people will say that over two Ranges. I had considered renaming something to “Distant” or “Distance”, but decided to keep the stats and weapon brackets as is.
– Brawl and Beast type attacks now specifically have a note that they cannot be used in a Charge OR for Snap Attacks. The main reason for this is Snap Attacks, since otherwise everyone gets a free shot as someone moves out of melee, instead of just people with dedicated close weapons (as was intended). This also prevents people from using Trip (which has the Stopped special ability) to lock down someone who is trying to leave combat. To keep consistency Charge was also affected by this.
– The Saloon now has “Passive” in small font where the Trait checkbox is, so that people can easily see at a glance if their trait is Active and can be used during combat, or if it’s Passive and already has the bonus applied.

So nothing major, but every little bit of polishing helps.