Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

Well we got in the second game of the Battle to Seattle campaign. I’m not going to link back to the introduction post each time, since I’m sure you can find it by this point.
The first game was a “demo game” with basic posses I designed, and was unrelated to the main storyline. Then my three friends designed their owns posses, and we pitted them against each other in a 3 player free-for-all. The setting for the encounter was the Mojave Desert. Each posse had heard about the rumored re-emergence of Seattle on the coast, so they all went to the local radio station tower to confirm the details. Unfortunately they ran into each other and ended up fighting over the tower.
There was an NPC character at the tower, basically a crazy woman who was said to control snakes and dinosaurs. She was quickly butchered by the combined posses as they considered her a significant threat.

The table itself had a few Features in play, specifically: Gusting Winds (2″ Pushed to all weapons), Hidden Tunnel (a series of them, marked with green doors), and a Road opposite one of the deployment zones. In addition the crates at the base of the tower were Fortified and Ammo, which hopefully would give anyone rushing to the base a better chance at defending.

The objective was to Capture the radio tower, with a hidden turn limit (in this case 4, which was one shorter than everyone expected :) ). Besides the usual bonus for winning an encounter, the player would receive some hidden information from what they heard on the radio tower.

The posses involved, which I’ll post eventually in their own entry, were Hadleys Hope, Dustin Tails, and Dustbowl Dusters. So…lots of dust in their names. Hadleys Hope consists of a two brother sniper team with a Stegosaurus. Dustin Tails is a three person, mostly Neotechnoist gang, with plenty of good weapons. And Dustbowl Dusters has three people and a Thickskull dinosaur, and generally has harder to kill members due to them being Dusters with boosted Hitpoints.

Anyway there was plenty of good shooting all around. Dustbowl Dusters took the initiative on charging the tower, and came under a LOT of fire as a result. Dustin Tails tried to cut through the Hidden Tunnels to get closer to the objective, and ended up disturbing some NPC lizards! These were related to the crazy woman, and basically emerged from each tunnel entrance and attacked the nearest target.

In the end Dustbowl Dusters were able to capture the radio tower, but at a heavy cost. They suffered two losses, one being the Leader, and BOTH of the people took Wounds! To make matters worse the Leader took a “Stunned Head” (which is pretty rare to roll), meaning they have a small chance at the start of each Activation to be Stunned. Ouch. The other out of action member took a Bruised Head Wound, so lots of brain damage all around!

The pictures are a bit shaky, but that’s life :)


Pictured: The table setup and early moves, with the road visible. Then the main radio tower from both sides. You can see the Thickskull aggressively capturing the objective.

So far all the minis are proxied from Warhammer 40,000. But orders are in from each player for some wild west figures. I’m looking forward to seeing them all arrayed against each other. Also notice the Stegosaurus is a non-Papo toy for once!

As for the post-encounter decisions, the route split from the radio tower to Las Vegas (now mostly ruined and mostly run by gangs) or Death Valley (super hot, with a rumored Neotechnoist science base). EVERYONE decided to go to Death Valley, which was a surprise to me!