Thrilling days of yesteryear

Perhaps appropriately, Cowboys: Way of the Gun is a game out of time. It was first published in 2007, but it has the look and feel of a game from the early 1980s, right down to the "bookshelf format" game box and a design sensibility that definitely favors function over form. It reminds me a lot of the 1989 Aliens board game, which is an excellent game design let down by weak production values.

Mechanically, Cowboys is a very well-designed small scale skirmish game that avoids a lot of the convoluted rules that seem to plague most games of this type. It plays on a grid for easy movement, and has simple game mechanics for establishing range and line of sight. Since it is played on pre-printed boards, the rules for moving and shooting through terrain are also very straightforward. It's a very fast-paced game, with the average scenario taking around 30 minutes to play.

"Move and shoot" games can get stale easily, and like several others such as 7TV and Alien vs. Predator: the Hunt Begins, this one uses a deck of event cards to give players a way to introduce some tactical decisions and unpredictability to the game. This game's event deck also functions as a standard poker deck, which allows it to be used as a random number generator for things like initiative. It might have been interesting to take this a step further and replace the dice with card draws to determine whether or not an attack is successful.

The real meat of the game is in its scenario book, which details 26 simple game setups that recreate famous gunfights both historical and fictional, from the shootout at the OK Corral to the three way standoff at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The scenarios in the book escalate slowly, starting with one-on-one "shootout at high noon" games before eventually moving on to more complex setups with victory conditions beyond simply killing all of the other side's cowboys.

Unfortunately the game falls seriously flat on its outdated production values. It uses cardboard standups and tokens in lieu of miniatures, which in itself wouldn't be a problem, but the artwork on the game pieces is very bland. The same holds true for the game's various boards depicting sections of wilderness or classic western buildings like saloons and banks, which is a pity because they are otherwise of pretty high quality, printed on nice sturdy cardboard.

"The fight's commenced! Get to fightin' or get away!"

That said, the game's simple rules make for some cinematic action that inspires the imagination. In one game, I had to have Wild Bill Hickok run into a general store to reload his weapon, then come crashing through the store's window into the street to get a shot at his opponent. In another, recreating the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, I was stuck with one character (Ike Clanton) who didn't have a weapon, so I had him run around getting in the way of my opponent's line of sight, much like the "get to fighting or get away" scene from the 1992 Tombstone movie.

It shouldn't be too difficult to find some gunfighter miniatures (in fact, I have tons of them) and maybe even find some western town maps with better artwork, which is all it would take to make this a truly great game.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The biggest problem with this game's weak production value is that it's a hard sell to get others to play, especially if they're not particularly interested in the historical west.

• Cowboys: Way of the Gun official website
• Cowboys: Way of the Gun on BoardGameGeek