Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

Battle to Seattle Start!
Remember my wordily titled Search for the Sunken Space Needle in Seattle campaign (shortened to “Battle to Seattle”)? Well, it officially started last week! I’m very excited to host this campaign for three friends as they battle north from the desert to the fabled sunken city of Seattle.

I can’t post the schedule of cities/events here, in case any of the involved players read it, but I can do recaps of previous sessions.

In the case of week 1 we started with a simple demo game, unrelated to the main campaign. The purpose of this game was to introduce everyone to the rules, show them various strengths/weaknesses of posse styles, and have a fun time. After the demo game everyone semi-secretly built their own custom posse, which I will detail in future posts.
Sufficient to say there are now three custom posses just chomping at the bit to start killing each other. Which will happen this week! We will have an “official” kick off game involving all three posses, then a chance to revise the posses (in case someone really regrets their build choice), and then the posses will be locked in and the rest of the campaign will continue.

Anyway for this first week demo game I created two posses that had identical members and slightly different dinosaurs (Ripper and Ducky). These resulted in the Thunder Valley Gang (Ripper version) and (Ducky version).

The game itself went off without a hitch. We played the simplest objective (Shoot Out) on the simplest deployment (Edge, in this case on the long table edges), with a turn limit of 5, and no Features (how rare!). Every game after this will be more complex and involved, but again I wanted to start with the basics to get everyone familiar with the rules. Since I am aiming to have two simultaneous 1vs1 games going at the same time it’s imperative that each player knows the rules well enough to play on their own, without me overseeing the game.
The posses can look forward to lots of decisions, various scenarios and situations, and (hopefully) plenty of fun over the next month or two.

Anyway we used one of my new 4’x3′ boards. The first picture (above) is of the setup before everyone showed up, and then an action shot a few turns in to the chaos: