Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

We had a great bonus game of Dinosaur Cowboys on Saturday, in the Battle to Seattle campaign. I told the players I was more than happy to run extra games outside our usual “games night”, and the response was good enough that we could get a fun “defend the resort!” mission going.
Unlike the last science station battle in Death Valley, this game was skewed very strongly towards the strengths of the player posses. Plus the fact that they did well at target priority and keeping their cool as 10 Savages and 3 Dinosaurs rushed towards them helps too! Fights like this always remind me of the V for Vendetta quote: “What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people *with* guns”. But that’s exactly how the game is intended to work, and I wanted a fight that was a bit more upbeat than charging a fortified structure like the science station.

Table Setup

Background and Setup
The fluff/background is basically Hadley’s Hope and Dustin Tails left Death Valley out the east side and tried to find shelter to heal their wounds, dust themselves off, and recover for the rest of the trip north. Meanwhile Dustbowl Dusters, who had made a leisurely trip north from the radio tower, heard about a ruined resort at the old Pahrump race track. So they descended on the villa to rest and relax.
Which meant all three posses were together at the resort. But the first two had baggage from their last battle, in the form of angry Savages from the Neotechnoist field team. The Savages gathered their clan mates and local hired guns and set forth to raid the race track.
The posses found a few bottles of whiskey in the resort, which they were intent to defend. They also found enough leftover, well stored, racing fuel to jury rig a Flamethrower.

The setup was pretty simple, and after the complex Feature usage of Death Valley I whittled down the number to the basics:

Deployment: #4 Delayed, from long edges (to represent some of you hanging out in the resort, and not being quick to the front line. On their end it represents the faster elements eagerly coming to grips).
Objective: #8 Defend. You will be the defenders. The objective will be the cask of Whiskey (a single objective).
Turn Limit: 5 (one less because of the long edge deploy)
Features: Weapon Emplacement (Jury Rigged Flamethrower, 8A-0D, 1-8 distance, Fireline). Road (the ruined track). Night (at the start of Turn 4).
Enemies: Bluescar Savages (original field team from science station), Death Valley Ravagers (their allies), Fire Column Bandits (some hired guns).

Quick Report
In general the battle went well for everyone but the Savages. The Savages were almost completely a melee posse, and charging a bunch of good guns with better RTN was suicidal.
In addition a gamble I made didn’t really pay off. Since we were using the Delayed deploy we had to put one entity from each posse “in reserve” to come on later. I decided to risk putting ALL my dinosaurs. My hope was they would come on in turn 2 (or 3, at the worst) on a flank, instead of the back edge, and rush in and distract everyone long enough for the surviving Savages to get to the whiskey objective.
Instead the dinosaurs showed up on turn 4, haha. When they DID turn up the T-Rex one shot killed a Dustin Tails shooter. But it was too little too late.

Pictures During the Game

In the end the three player posses got a TON of IP and ND, which is great for giving them more options to play with. All the kills were shared, and I think they got something like 8 in total.
After the battle Dustbowl Dusters have 150 IP and $1560, Hadley’s Hope has 160 IP and $1630, and Dustin Tails have 170 IP and $1730. Quite a nice progression actually. No real Wounds to talk about.

Next Game
In terms of the next game, everyone chose to go to Lake Tahoe. But this time we’ll be doing two side-by-side simultaneous 1vs1 battles, with a random roll to see who fights the “NPC posse”. Should be a neat setup. I envision them fighting on opposite sides of the main lake.

Campaign Going Forward
Three important items to talk about for the Battle to Seattle campaign going forward.

First of all the posse Hadley’s Hope has been renamed to “New Haven Vigilantes”, so be aware of that.

Second I’ve sent out an invite email to various friends to see if they’d want to drop in and play the NPC posse (instead of me doing it). So maybe we’ll get some guest players.

And finally we’ll be moving to the new weapons from the upcoming v2.5. I know I waffled on this, and maybe even said “We won’t move during the campaign” in earlier posts. But the variety and balance of the new weapons won me over. So the posses will be slightly tweaked to use the new weapons. Once that is done, which will be in two weeks (no game next week), then I’ll probably pot v2.5 and update The Saloon. Expect a v2.6 after the campaign though with any other changes and fixes we encountered.