A kinder, gentler wild west: Old West Empresario

There are a few games in my collection that I would classify as “comfort games” – games I’ve played enough times, and with relatively simple rules, that I don’t need to worry about re-learning the game when I sit down to play. These games tend to be relatively non-confrontational, but not often cooperative, as co-op games tend to ramp up the difficulty to compensate for the lack of a thinking opponent. No, I’m talking about games that are relaxing to play, maybe after a stressful day or on a lazy weekend, competitive but not overly confrontational.

One of my favorites in this category is Old West Empresario, a sadly out-of-print game about building a town in the old west. The western theme appeals to me, but what appeals to me even more is the simple but engaging game play.

Like a surprising number of wild west games, this one is about building a town. The game starts with 12 tiles, representing buildings, in the center of the table. These are in groups of two, with each group numbered one through six (identified by a number tile). The rest of the tiles go in the box lid or a bag, to be drawn randomly throughout the game. Each player starts with a Town Hall and a random tile, which begins the game on its unconstructed side, and also a character with a unique game ability, and three coins. Additionally, the game begins with three sets of two Wanted cards, each of which will reward the first and second player to accomplish particular objectives.

At the start of each game round, the starting player rolls a number of six-sided dice: two for each player plus one extra. These dice are placed next to their corresponding set of tiles in the center of the table. On each player’s turn they choose one of the remaining dice and either take a tile from that die’s set, or use the die to activate their town (more on that in a moment). The die is then discarded, and after each player has taken two turns the last remaining die is used by all players to activate their towns.

When a tile is taken, the player can either discard it to gain three coins, or place it in their town on its unconstructed side – the building it represents will still need to be built. Tiles must be placed adjacent to other tiles. A lot of the game’s strategy is in where you place particular types of buildings, as many of them will give income, end-of-game victory points, or other bonuses based on what buildings they are adjacent to.

But buildings still have to be built, and this is where activating your town comes in. Instead of taking a new tile, a player can use their turn to choose a die and then activate all the constructed buildings in their town that are marked with the number shown on the die. Early on this will be your town hall, which allows you to construct the other buildings that you’ve placed, but eventually you’ll have a range of different options such as gaining townsfolk or coins, collecting extra tiles, or even forcing your opponent to lose a coin with the dreaded Undertakers (which also causes you to lose points at the end of the game if it’s too close to the center of town).

Since you only get to activate the buildings that match the die you’ve chosen, you have to think carefully about which tiles to place in your town. If you end up with a lot of the same number you’ll get to do a lot when that number comes up on a die roll, but if it doesn’t, you won’t be able to do much on your turn. You also have to think about when to choose and place certain tiles, since their neighboring buildings will affect how many points they’re worth a the end of the game. But if you wait too long to grab that tile, one of your opponents might get it first.

The game ends when one player has 15 or more buildings in their town, or when a pre-determined number of townsfolk counters have run out. The townsfolk are a secondary currency used to pay for some game effects, and are also worth victory points. Additionally, the artwork on them is adorable, and eagle-eyed players might just recognize a few of the characters...

Maeve and Dolores from HBO's Westworld.

Townsfolk from Old West Empresario.

The only direct competition is the available dice and tiles each turn, and the Wanted cards which offer extra points to the first and second player who hit specific achievements such as having a certain number or type of buildings in their town. So it’s fairly non-confrontational and puzzle-like, but in a good way Honestly I like it better than similar but more complex games like Carson City, especially when considering its effort-to-entertainment ratio. The amount of decision-making hits that sweet spot where you always feel like you have good options, without descending into the dreaded analysis paralysis.

Sadly the game’s publisher went out of business a few years ago, and I don’t think it made enough of a splash to entice anyone else to pick it up for a reprint. But there seem to be plenty of copies out there, on eBay and in the used games market.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) One of those great “simple but engaging” games that we might not play all that often, but is always a joy when we get it to the table.

Roll West, young man...

"Roll and write" is an emerging style of game that seeks to reduce production costs by eschewing cards, tiles and tokens in favor of players simply marking changes to the game state on a piece of paper with a pencil or pen. This allows these games to be sold at a much lower price point, which can only be an asset in the increasingly crowded board game market.

Actually, roll and write games have been around for many years, with Yahtzee usually pointed to as the first commercial example. But the genre has exploded in recent years, either as a way for game publishers to increase their visibility in stores by putting out simplified versions of games like Settlers of Catan or Patchwork, but just as often with off-the-wall ideas that might not support a $60 board game.

We picked up Rolled West on a whim, having not played any roll and write games (other than Yahtzee), and also having not played Gold West, the full board game it's based on,. So we should be able to judge the game on its own merits without comparison to its parent game or other games in the same genre.

Each player is given a dry-erase board showing what initially looks like a dizzying array of icons. But once you play a few times it's pretty straightforward. The icons represent banked resources, boom town buildings, shipment routes, and mining contracts and claims. On his or her turn, the acting player rolls 4 dice showing symbols that equate to copper, silver, gold, and wood. The player chooses one of these to represent the terrain for the turn, and the other three are resources that can either be spent or banked for use on a future turn.

Players spend combinations of resources on the aforementioned buildings, routes, contracts and claim, with an eye towards maximizing their points at the end of the game. There are a lot of options, so clever players will quickly identify a particular strategy, such as staking claims and building mining camps, developing shipping routes, or saving up resources to buy expensive but lucrative contracts, and then staying with that strategy over the course of the game's six turns. Trying to do a little of everything, or changing strategies mid-game, can be disastrous, as the points tend to rack up the farther along you go on a single track, such as staking claims in the woods or developing a shipping line for silver ore.

Boom town buildings confer bonus points based on the other things you've developed in the game, which can be tricky since you don't want to invest in a particular building before you've figured out what your strategy is. At the same time, as soon as one player buys a building it is no longer available to the other players (the corresponding icon is crossed off on their board), so you don't want to wait too long either.

Players also have the option to bank one resource each turn for future use. Banking resources is really the only way to save up for high value contracts that generally require four or five resources but are worth a lot of points at the end of the game, Additionally, in between each of a player's turns they can bank one of the resources rolled by another player. This doesn't prevent the other player from using it, it just allows you to use it also. This is one of the more interesting decision points in the game, since it can only be done once between each turn -- you're always running the risk of banking a resource, only to have someone else roll a more useful one before your turn comes around again.

As you can see, there is a lot going on here, especially for a game that consists of four dice and what amounts to a 4x6 card for each player. My only complaint about the game is that the iconography on the player cards can be a bit difficult to remember, causing frequent referral to the rules to answer "what does this mean again?" questions. It might have been better to make the player boards larger and include gameplay reminders and tips.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) It's got a huge amount of depth for such a simple game, and yet it can still be played in 30 minutes or so.

• Rolled West on BoardGameGeek
• Weirdly, there is no mention of this game on the publisher's website

Deadwood 1876: small things come in good packages

I was drawn to the Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876 by its terrific artwork and simple, elegant graphic design, so let's talk about that first.

It is a great looking game. It comes packaged (like all of the games in the "dark city" series from Facade Games) in a box designed to look like an old leather bound book with a magnetic lid. All the game components other than the cards are made of wood (no plastic) and beautifully designed, especially the three engraved discs that represent the locations in the game. The artwork on the cards is very well-rendered, in a style that is just cartoony enough to be expressive but without looking silly.

The game's design is also very minimal, which appeals to me as a respite from the current trend towards overproduced Kickstarter games with hundreds of plastic miniatures and overdone, hard to read boards and rulebooks. Finally something simple and (hopefully) easy to play.

Or is it?

The rules and mechanics of the game are simple enough. The game consists of Safe cards, Deadwood cards, and three locations at the center of the table. Each player starts with two face down safe cards in front of them, and there is a stack of three more in the center; Safe cards consist mainly of gold in various denominations, with a few guns and other items sprinkled in.

Players also start with a hand of Deadwood cards that represent items used to perform actions: guns for fighting, horses for movement, and various bits of leatherwork such as hats and holsters for manipulating the cards in various ways. Player pawns are randomly distributed among the three locations (more on this in a moment).

The goal of the game is to be in the location whose occupants collectively have the most gold (depicted on their face down Safe cards) at the end of the game. Once the winning location has been determined, the occupants of that location use their remaining weapon cards to fight it out to see who the final winner is.

Play consists of each player playing one Deadwood card from their hand. A card can be played as a weapon to attack another player, in order to either take one of their safes, or to switch places with another player's pawn or force them to leave your location. Weapons have variable strengths but use dice to determine the outcome of combat, so a lower card isn't necessarily a lost cause. Or, it can be played for another effect such as moving between locations (if there's room, each location is limited to a certain number of player pawns), peeking at face down Safe cards, or drawing extra Deadwood cards from the deck.

After each player has had a turn to play a card, there is a heist round, where players use weapon cards to fight it out for one of the safes in the middle of the table. Then another round of play begins, and so on, until all the safes in the center have been claimed. At that point there is one final round, and then the winning location is determined and the final showdown happens.

It sounds like there's a lot going on, and there is, but there is one critical problem. A key strategy to the game is figuring out who has the high value safes, so you can either steal them or make sure you're at the location with the most gold at the end. It's supposed to be a "game of shifting alliances" where you side with the others in your location to make sure you collectively have the most gold, and then backstab them in the final showdown. The problem is that with only four turns per player before the final showdown, you just don't have enough time for the amount of social deduction or level of strategy that the game calls for.

Because of the amount of bluffing and secret information involved, the game relies on all the players having a roughly equal understanding of the rules and especially the strategy, which makes it very difficult to teach. This is a major problem for a game that, like any "shifting alliances" game, needs a large number of players to be interesting.

On the other hand, I think there is a fun game here somewhere, and the gorgeous design and components make me want to keep trying to make it work.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Too much social deduction for a board game, or perhaps too much structure for a social deduction game, but the game is beautiful to look at.

• Deadwood 1876 official website
• Deadwood 1876 on Board Game Geek

Going your own route with Western Legends

“Leave me alone and let me go to hell by my own route.” 

– "Calamity" Jane Cannary, shortly before her death in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1903. 

I love open world adventure games like Runebound, Fortune and Glory, and the mother of them all, Talisman. I also love the historical western genre, and have often found myself wishing, "if only there were a wild west version of Talisman..."

Well, now there is. Western Legends took Kickstarter by storm last year, billing itself as a wild west sandbox board game, and for the most part it delivers on that promise.

Players take on the roles of legendary historical figures such as Doc Holliday, Calamity Jane, Billy the Kid, or even lesser known characters like Bass Reeves or Y. B. Rowdy (this game does a better job than most at equal representation, with nearly half of the playable characters being women or people of color). The object of the game is to roam the countryside earning "Legendary Points" towards a goal determined by the length of game the players decide on at the start.

Players can earn points by prospecting for gold or herding cattle, but the real meat of the game is in the decision to either follow a path of law and order as a Marshal, or become a Wanted outlaw. Marshals spend the game tracking down non-player bandits as well as players who have gone renegade, facing off in combat via a clever poker-based game mechanic. Outlaws can choose to rob the bank, steal cattle, but have to watch out for player Marshals as well as a non-player Sheriff, because getting caught will force them to pay a hefty fine and set them back to the start of the outlaw track. Players can even switch careers midway through the game -- you aren't locked into a single course of action and can switch gears as needed.

The problem with a lot of open world games is that it's often difficult for players to figure out what they should be doing. Western Legends deals with this through several goal-oriented game mechanics. First of all, each player character comes with a set of goal cards outlining fairly simple tasks to perform such as winning fights or rustling cattle. There is also a story deck, which rewards players who achieve certain goals with bonus points or equipment as well as a bit of back story.

If I have any problem with Western Legends it's that it doesn't really shine at lower player counts. Playing the game with two requires the use of a third character, the Man in Black, whose actions are determined by a random set of cards. It works, but the game is a lot more fun with a full table of 4-5 players so Marshals have plenty of outlaws to chase, and outlaws have plenty of other outlaws to distract the Marshal...

Rating: 5 (out of 5) a terrific game that does exactly what it set out to do, which is to provide open-ended board game adventures in the wild west.

• Western Legends official website
• Western Legends on Board Game Geek

Cowboys: Way of the Gun -- 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

Grimslingers: weirder western tales

I love westerns, and as such I have a huge weakness for games in that genre, of which there are surprisingly few. While I prefer a straight-up historical western, I'm willing to settle for weird westerns with fantastical elements added, and that more-or-less describes the theme of Grimslingers.

Grimslingers is really two games in one: a fairly simple combat game about dueling sorcerers, and a much more engaging cooperative adventure game in which players work through a storyline that introduces them to the world of the game, fighting weird monsters and gaining spells and items along the way.

The dueling game is really just a combat system and not particularly interesting on its own -- the cooperative game is where Grimslingers really shines. Players start out with a hand full of basic spells and a few items, moving around on a small map to gather more powerful spells and better pieces of equipment, gain experience that allows them to play more effectively, and unfold the events of the (admittedly very linear) story.

It's still essentially a combat deck-building card game, and a somewhat clunky one at that, but it does have a few interesting innovations. Principle among them is that players don't have a randomized deck. Instead, they have a maximum hand size (which increases as they gain experience) and a "stash" that they can freely look through and take cards from at certain points during the game. Once used cards are put into either a discard pile or a deactivated pile, and can only be recovered by spending energy points, the game's main currency for playing cards.

Additional cards are earned by defeating monsters and also at certain points in the storyline, which makes it a little different from the usual "play cards to buy more cards" mechanics that most deck-building games employ.

Despite these innovations, the game play is a bit clunky. Having two different discard piles with slightly different rules governing them is needlessly fiddly, and too much of the game rides on random dice rolls or draws from a separate deck of numbered cards. In a recent game we played, we made it three quarters of the way through the game, only to be defeated by a random event card and some bad number card draws.

But all that aside, the real point of the game is as a framework to hang the setting on, and a wonderful setting it is. The world of Grimslingers is a perfectly balanced mix of western, post-apocalypse, science fiction, and fantasy, with a surprising amount of humor thrown in, and supported by some truly spectacular artwork. The game is clunky, but not so clunky that it distracts from the world it takes place in.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Game play alone would probably be a 2, but the setting is so vibrant and original that it more than makes up for it.

• Grimslingers official website
• Grimslingers on BoardGameGeek

Send lawyers, guns and money: Tiny Epic Western

At its core, Tiny Epic Western is a game about controlling commercial real estate in the wild west.

The game consists of six mats placed in a circle, with locations on each that offer different resources or game abilities. Players use worker placement to secure those locations to secure the resources they need, either money, law, or force (or lawyers, guns and money for you Warren Zevon fans). These resources are used in different combinations to buy building cards from an available pool, which then give victory points as well as additional locations that can be used on future turns. Play goes for six turns, at which time the winner is the player with the most victory points.

That may not sound particularly wild or western, but if you think about it, the struggle in the American West was entirely about controlling land - land for farming and settlement, land for mining gold and silver, land for building towns to exploit the new found wealth of the people mining the gold and silver, land to build railroad tracks, and so on. The famous gunfight in Tombstone was the result of a power struggle between two factions trying to control the town, and the range war that Billy the Kid found himself involved in was started by two competing mercantile companies. So really, nothing could be more wild western than fighting over who controls the general store or the post office.

In order to convey the sense of struggle and lawlessness, Tiny Epic Western adds some very clever game play to the standard worker placement game model. In most worker placement games, you place your worker to either get a particular game effect (usually a resource of some kind), or to prevent your opponent from getting it. Tiny Epic Western does that too, but many of the spaces on the board only give a reward if the player wins a hand of three-card poker, either against the other players who have placed their workers on the same mat, or against a non-player rival.

The way the poker works is particularly interesting. As already mentioned, the main play area is made up of six mats placed in a circle. In between each mat there is a poker card drawn from an abbreviated deck made up of cards numbered one through five in four suits. At the start of each round, players are dealt a "hole card" from the deck, and after all workers are placed, they must play a round of poker against the other players who have workers on the same mat, using their own card and the cards on either side of the mat to make the best poker hand they can. The winner earns an overall reward, and additionally many of the spaces on the mat only pay out to the poker winner.

To prevent a player from winning simply by virtue of being the only player on a particular mat, there is a non-player "rival," a card which is dealt face down at the start of each round and revealed to provide an opponent when no other players are fighting for control of that particular mat.

It's very thematic, and it adds an air of strategy and uncertainty to worker placement, when in most games the advantage always goes to the player who places first.

As if that weren't enough, it's also possible to duel other players for placement in a particular space. If another player's worker is in the space you want, you can challenge him to a duel, which involves rolling dice, spending resources for re-rolls, and possibly using your hole card to give you an extra advantage. The winner of the duel gets control of the space, and also gets the "wanted" card, which provides extra resources, and is also worth victory points to whoever is holding it at the end of the game.

The game is tense, exciting, involves a lot of strategic decision making, and the only real random element is the dice-rolling during gunfights. It's very engaging, and the western theme is fully integrated rather than just painted on. Not bad for a game about real estate...

Rating: 5 (out of 5) It's everything it says on the box: an epic power struggle of a game with a strong western feel, and it comes in a very small box.

• Tiny Epic Western official website
• Tiny Epic Western on BoardGameGeek

Explore the west in Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis & Clark

Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis & Clark is one of two games that came to my attention at around the same time, by the same designer, featuring artwork by the same artist. Due to my enjoyment of Manifest Destiny (a terrific comic book series that features the Lewis & Clark expedition encountering all manner of supernatural monsters during their journey), I had decided that I wanted a Lewis & Clark game.

I spent a little time researching Discoveries and Lewis & Clark: the Expedition, and for reasons I can no longer recall, I decided on Discoveries.

It's a charming little dice-placement game, an emerging game style that combines common Euro-style worker placement game mechanics with dice rolling, so that the roll of the dice determines how limited your choices for worker placement are, rather than competing with other players for available spaces on the board.

Over the course of the game, players use their dice in various combinations to purchase Tribe cards, representing various native tribes encountered by the expedition, and Discoveries cards, depicting terrain features as well as plants and animals to be cataloged. The Tribe cards provide additional options for dice spending that make it easier to purchase Discoveries, which are ultimately how each player earns points towards winning the game.

Spent dice are placed on a board at the center of the table, either to the right or the left depending on what they were used for, and this generates one of the more interesting decision points of the game. Each player has 5 dice of their own color, as well as a number of neutral dice that can be picked up in various ways. A player can forego their normal turn in order to replenish their supply of dice, and when they do, the have two choices: they can either pick up all the dice, regardless of color, on either the left or the right side of the board, or they can pick up all the dice of their color, regardless of whether they are on the central board or in use by another player.

Picking up dice from the board can potentially net you more dice to use, giving you more options on your turn. However, using dice of your opponent's colors is risky since they could take them back at any time. This can be a problem as some of the tasks you spend your dice on need to be carried out over multiple turns, and progress on those tasks is lost if an opponent decides to take back a die that you are using.

I find the game very appealing, and reasonably unique among the games in my collection both in terms of game play and theme. However, I'm still curious about the other Lewis & Clark game...

Rating: 3 (out of 5) It's a fairly simple game, but with some interesting decisions to make and some beautiful artwork to look at.

• Discoveries: The Journals of Louis & Clark official website
• Discoveries: The Journals of Louis & Clark on BoardGameGeek.com

Bang! -- the fight has commenced...

I really enjoy Bang!, but it's often a struggle to get together a large enough group to make the game interesting. Additionally, I find the game's "guess what role everyone is playing" aspect to be less interesting than the combat mechanics and spaghetti western theme.

I love the idea of a two-player version of Bang!, emulating the classic showdown at high noon seen in so many western films, so I was happy to see that it has become a reality with Bang!: the Duel. The choice to make it a separate game rather than an expansion or rules variant is interesting; the game is similar enough to the core Bang! game that I'm certain it began as a variant, with the designers eliminating cards and game features (such as the hidden roles) and adding others to support the two-player format.

Players choose to either play as the Law or the Outlaw, with a separate deck of cards for each. Unlike most "separate deck: games however, cards played go to a common discard pile, and as soon as one player runs out of cards this is shuffled together into one deck, representing the idea that as the battle progresses, each side gets more desperate and starts using the other's tactics.

As with Bang!, the game features character cards with unique abilities, but in The Duel, each player plays with a stack of characters (four in a normal game, but this can be scaled for shorter or longer games). Each player has two characters in play at a time, one "active" and one "rearguard." Only the active character's abilities are in play, but they can switch places during the player's turn or as a result of game effects. If a character is killed, the next one in the stack steps up, and the game ends when one player runs out of characters.

It's a fast-paced, simple game that is recognizably still Bang!,while making the game system work as a two-player duel, and it retains the spaghetti western flavor that drew me to Bang! in the first place. I kind of wish this version could be played with more than two...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) An easier-to-play version of the spaghetti western classic.

• Bang! the Duel official website
• Bang! the Duel on BoardGameGeek

Table for two: a trio of two-player games

As a gaming couple, we are always on the lookout for good two-player games. Granted, many multiplayer games work perfectly well with two, but more often than not they are designed with a larger group of players in mind.

We recently picked up a few new two-player games:

Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion is for the most part a re-skin of Cold War: CIA vs. KGB, and an entry into an emerging sub-category of games based on popular licensed properties and marketed more for their status as tie-in merchandise than for their game play. That's not necessarily a criticism, as it's easy to see that Star Wars is a much easier sell than 1960s global intrigue.

The game makes the transition from cold war to star war fairly easily, with a few minor changes and additions. Each round, an event card is played to the center of the table, representing an event from the original trilogy of Star Wars films such as "Duel on Cloud City" or "Locate the Rebel Base." Players secretly choose a strategy card to use for that round, which either gives them a boost towards winning the event, or an advantage in the following round. Players then attempt to score points for these events by playing cards that add up to a pre-determined value without going over.

Each player plays from their own deck of cards, which includes either the heroes or the villains of the Star Wars saga. These character cards have unique abilities that can be used when they are in play, and their value towards the total required to win the event is different depending on whether they have used their ability or not. Whether or not to use a character ability (and change your total) becomes one of the main strategic decisions in the game. Influence tokens, which are awarded upon winning an event and can be spent to re-use a card's ability, are another component that feeds the game's strategy and makes it different from Cold War.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Not quite as simple and elegant as Cold War, but the Star Wars theme will most likely have a much wider appeal.

• Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion official website
• Star Wars: Empire vs. Rebellion on BoardGameGeek

I'm a huge fan of Jurassic Park, Primeval, and all things dinosaur, so Raptor was a pretty easy sell for me. It's a two-player tactical movement game in which one player controls a team of scientists trying to gather baby velociraptors for study, and the other player controls the raptors and their outraged mother.

The board is made up of 6 square tiles, each with a 9x9 grid of spaces, plus two 1x3 end tiles on each side. Each tile has a different pattern of empty spaces and obstacles, so the board will be different for each game. The game starts with the mother and 5 baby raptor figures on the board, one on each tile, and four scientist figures, two on either end of the board.

Each player has a deck of 9 cards, each with a number from 1 to 9 and an action that player can perform. Players start with a hand of 3 cards, from which they simultaneously choose and reveal one card, comparing the two. The player with the lower number performs the action listed on the card, which are things like hide in the jungle or scare the humans for the raptor player, and reinforcements or move by jeep for the scientist player. The player with the higher number gets a number of action points to spend equal to the difference between the two cards. Action points are spent to move and attack.

Not knowing for sure what you're going to be able to do each round is the key feature of the game, and strategy consists of trying to anticipate what your opponent is going to do based on the figures' placement on the board. It's got a nice balance of randomness and strategic decision making, with simple, intuitive rules.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) A nice mix of tactical movement and card-playing, and I love the dinosaurs vs. humans theme.

• Raptor official website
• Raptor on BoardGameGeek

Longhorn is another game we picked up on impulse based mainly on the genre. In this case, the wild west theme is largely tacked on, and the game itself is pretty abstract.

The board consists of 9 tiles, each with an effect and a random number of cows of different colors on it. There is a single pawn which represents both players. On each player's turn, that player takes all the cows of one color from the tile he is on, and then moves the pawn a number of spaces equal to the number of cows taken. Then it's the other player's turn to take cows an move the pawn. If a player takes the last cow from a tile, that tile's effect is resolved, with different effects including things like taking cows from adjacent spaces or the other player, getting extra points at the end of the game, or having to put cows you've taken back on the board.

It sounds simple, but as usual there is a bit more to it. The pawn can never be moved to an empty tile, and if there are no populated tiles to move to, the game ends. Cows are worth points based on the number of cows of that color still on the board at the end of the game, which means there is quite a bit of strategy involved in deciding which cows to take, and where to move the pawn so that your opponent's choices are limited.

It is interesting to note that Raptor and Longhorn are both by the same designer, Bruno Cathala (Raptor was co-designed by Bruno Faidutti).

Rating: 2 (out of 5) It's almost more of a puzzle than a game, and its one of the few games that we strongly disagree on; I think it's okay, but Katherine finds it really uninteresting.

• Longhorn official website
• Longhorn on BoardGameGeek

Check out some of the other two player games we've reviewed.

Colt Express: the great cardboard train robbery

The train robbery is a standard western trope, from 1903's The Great Train Robbery all the way through to the two spectacular train action sequences in 2013's The Lone Ranger. Joss Whedon even used a train robbery as the centerpiece of the first regular episode of his space western TV series Firefly.

But imagine the chaos if six different bandits all tried to rob the same train at the same time. I don't think that's ever been done before, but it's what happens in Colt Express.

The playing area in Colt Express consists of several train cars loaded with money and jewels, along with an engine that contains a box full of money but also an ornery Marshall who will kick bandits out of any train car he finds them in. Rather than a flat board, the game gives you a charming set of three dimensional train cars which allow players to move their pieces through the interior of the train, and also on the roof.

Players take the roles of individual bandits, each with a unique ability. Play consists of several rounds of playing move cards to a common stack, and then resolving those move cards in the order they were played. Since some cards are played face down, you don't always know what your opponents are doing, and some actions can result in your piece being moved unexpectedly, which can throw off the rest of your moves. The goal of the game is to have the most loot when the game ends after five rounds.

The predetermined moves aspect of the game invites comparisons to Robo Rally, but Colt Express manages to be a lot less frustrating and a lot more charming (I've played with people who hate Robo Rally but really liked Colt Express). I think the fact that you don't have to plan all your moves for the round at once is one reason. When playing your moves, you can react, in a limited fashion, to what your opponents are doing. The limited time frame is another plus; one of the main complaints I often hear about Robo Rally is that it can sometimes take hours to play. A game of Colt Express generally takes 30-45 minutes, and the pace is much faster. There is never a sense of being "stuck" like there often is in Robo Rally.

The playing pieces themselves are delightful, if a bit small for adult hands. The three dimensional train cars are beautifully illustrated, and the game includes pieces of scenery that have no bearing on game play, but can be scattered around the table for decorative effect.

Rating: 5 (out of 5) Out of a few recent Robo Rally-like games, this one is a clear favorite, not just for the western theme (always a plus for me) but for the light, fun tone and fast-paced game play.

• Colt Express official website
• Colt Express on BoardGameGeek

Shadows of Brimstone: a western horror dungeon crawl

It may come as a bit of a surprise that when I first heard about Shadows of Brimstone, I wasn't terribly interested. Sure, I love an adventure game, I love a horror game, and I really love a western game, and this promised to be all three, plus it was coming from Flying Frog Productions, the publisher behind two of my favorite board games (Fortune and Glory and A Touch of Evil). But the setting looked like a rather appalling rip off of Shane Hensley's Deadlands, and at the time I was suffering from Kickstarter exhaustion, and not really interested in backing another expensive game.

I was resigned to ignoring this game, but then a very generous friend gave me a copy for my birthday, freely admitting that his motivations were somewhat selfish: he wanted to play the game, but didn't want to assemble and paint the miniatures (more on that in a moment). It looked like I would be taking a closer look at Shadows of Brimstone after all.

It's definitely a game in the midst of an identity crisis. The mash-up of wild west and unspeakable horror isn't entirely new (see the aforementioned Deadlands and its accompanying card game, Doomtown), but it adds elements of the classic dungeon crawl to the mix, setting the game in an abandoned mine represented by a board of interlocking room and corridor pieces.

More than that, Shadows of Brimstone can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a role playing game, a board game, or a tactical miniatures game, so it tries to be all three, and not entirely successfully.

At its heart, I think Shadows of Brimstone wants to be a "role playing game in a box" like Hero Quest, Descent, or Mansions of Madness. Players take on the roles of archetypical western characters, and go adventuring in the dungeon-like mine which may or may not contain a portal to a Lovecraftian other world, depending on the scenario being played. Unlike Mansions of Madness or Descent, the game avoids the need for a game master to control the villains, instead combining a basic scenario outline with a deck of randomized cards to determine the shape of the board and what monsters are encountered.

An initial, major turn off for me was the "assembly required" nature of the game's miniatures, which come in several pieces on plastic sprues and require several hours of assembly before the game can even be played. I don't mind painting miniatures or even a minor bit of assembly, but this was above and beyond, requiring a professional level of model making that is normally reserved for players of high-end tactical games such as Warhammer.

Perhaps because of the lack of a game master, encounters tend to be very combat-heavy and light on story, and this is where the game is most successful. The simple rules for determining the monsters' actions work well, and the combat system is pretty straightforward, although without a player controlling the monsters, their tactics tend to be of the "move into position and then keep hitting you until you or the monster goes down" variety.

The game's attempts to mix board game and role playing elements are less successful. It has a lot of the things you would expect from an adventure board game, such as cards and counters representing your character's possessions and abilities, but these are strangely incomplete, with no in-game way to track a character's money or experience points other than writing them down, which seems awfully low-tech. The game designers insist that this isn't a problem, but it's very telling that the fan community very quickly stepped in to fill this gap in the game's components, creating a variety of unofficial print-and-play money and experience tokens.

In a similar vein, the game has an abstracted feature that allows players to visit town between dungeon (sorry, "mine") encounters, with the result of their last encounter sometimes even having an effect on the town visit. While in town players can spend their money and experience to buy better equipment and improve their abilities, but there are no cards or tokens to represent these improvements. Players are expected to just write them down on a character sheet.

The problem I have with the game's reliance on a written character sheet is that there are actually very few character creation options available. Players starting a new campaign must choose from one of four different archetypes, and from there they choose one of three option cards, but that's really it. The addition of a character sheet really seems like a cheap way to make up for some conspicuously missing components.

One role playing element I do really like about Shadows of Brimstone is the idea of multiple games being linked as a campaign, with characters gaining experience and abilities as they progress across gradually more involved and difficult scenarios. It's a neat idea that gives the game a more epic scope than other, similar games. I just wish it either had more consistent board game components, or more open-ended role playing game options.

Rating: UNDECIDED. I want to like this game, but it has some weird shortcomings. I really feel like we need to play through a few more games before I give it a rating.

• Shadows of Brimstone official website
• Shadows of Brimstone on BoardGameGeek

Revolver: cowboys or Aliens?

Revolver is kind of a strange game, but perhaps a little bit less so if you know how it started out.

It's a two-player card game set in the wild west, with each player using a separate deck. One player is the fearsome Colty gang, who have just robbed the bank at Repentance Springs and must now escape to the Mexican border, pursued by Colonel MacReady and his horde of lawmen and bounty hunters. It seems like a pretty straightforward plot for a western, but once you set up the game and start playing, you begin to notice a few peculiarities.

The game begins with four location cards in the center of the table. The outlaw player has spend a certain number of rounds at each location, fighting off lawmen before moving on to the next location in the line. If the outlaw player makes it to the fourth and final location with at least one or two of his characters intact, he wins.

The outlaw player starts with 16 character cards in play, each representing a distinct member of the Colty Gang. Some of them have particular game text and/or a negative effect if that character dies, but many of them appear to be nothing but cannon fodder. The cards in the outlaw player's deck represent weapons and actions, most of which contribute firepower to the battle raging at whatever location is active.

The lawman player doesn't start with any characters in play, and in fact only has a few unique characters, with most of his deck made up of generic deputies, scouts and hired guns, who directly contribute firepower to the current battle (unlike the outlaw characters, who must play weapon cards).

At the end of each round, if the lawman player has more firepower in play than the outlaw player, one of the outlaw characters is killed and taken out of play. Each round that the lawmen fail to kill at least one of the outlaws, the outlaw player gets to remove a token from the "Mexican Border" card that is off to the side, and can win the game early by removing all the tokens from this card.

The game has a weird flow to it that doesn't make a lot of sense unless you are aware that it was originally an unlicensed, fan-produced game based on the second movie in the Alien series. It was re-themed as a western game when the designer decided he wanted to publish the game without paying for the Aliens license.

Now it all makes sense. The 16 outlaws are the human Colonial Marines, along with Ripley, Newt and Burke, being picked off one by one as they move through the different areas of the doomed colony, trying to escape from hordes of nameless, faceless Aliens, who have been replaced with nameless, faceless deputies and bounty hunters.

I must admit that I haven't played the Aliens version of this game, but it's obvious that the structure of the game is based solidly on the film, and it's easy to look at the Revolver characters and guess their Aliens counterparts. I suspect that this is a case where the game play suits the theme too well, to the point that changing the theme diminishes the game. All the game elements make sense when married to the Aliens story, and I can see the Aliens version doing a decent job of putting you in the action of the movie and making you care about characters you're familiar with.

Unfortunately, Revolver doesn't do a particularly good job of telling its own story, so you're left with ill-fitting game mechanics and a game about characters and situations you aren't given any reason to care about.

Rating: 2 (out of 5) The game play doesn't fit the theme, and doesn't hold up particularly well on its own.

• Revolver official website
• Revolver on BoardGameGeek
• Aliens: This Time It's War on BoardGameGeek

Spurs: a Tale in the Old West -- Hell-bent for leather

I enjoy most of the genres that fictional media tends to fall into, but I have an undeniable soft spot for historical westerns. There are a fair number of western themed board games out there, but the vast majority of them tend to be either shootout games that revolve entirely around combat (such as Bang!), or Euro-style resource management building games. I had never been able to find a western adventure game other than the Deadlands: Doomtown collectible card game, which has a very overt supernatural element to it and is really more of a location control game, which is typical of most CCGs.

So it didn't take much to convince me to back the Kickstarter campaign for Spurs: A Tale in the Old West. It appeared to be exactly the sort of game I was looking for, a "move around the board and draw a card to see what happens" game in the vein of Talisman or Fortune and Glory. I'm happy to say that Spurs delivers on its promise perfectly, and in a few unexpected ways.

Players take the roles of archetypical western characters such as the cowboy, the outlaw, or the gambler, and travel the board by rolling some really neat proprietary dice with horse icons on them. At any given time, eight spaces on the board contain a tile with a task to be performed, and this is where the game gets really interesting for a fan of western history. In addition to the expected showdowns with outlaws and desperadoes, players can advance in the game by prospecting for gold, hunting wild animals such as bears and cougars, and even by herding cattle or taming horses.

There is a terrific little mini game with its own board for cattle herding and horse taming. It's a hex board with 19 spaces on it, and for the cattle herding mini game, six cattle tokens are distributed randomly across the board. The player chooses a cow and then rolls a number of dice equal to his character's riding skill to. The dice represent different directions the cow can move; from each roll, the player chooses one die and moves the cow in the direction indicated, with the goal being to get as many of them as possible into a single group within a certain number of moves. The horse taming game is similar, with the horse running off in different directions and the player trying not to crash into nearby trees or rocks.

It is this inclusion of the more mundane aspects of life in the wild west that I find fascinating about the game. I love that it is just as viable a strategy (and often more interesting) to tame horses and sell them in town as it is to hunt for outlaws.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) There isn't much story to the game, but I think that actually contributes to the feeling of having the freedom to just explore the world of the wild west.

• Spurs: A Tale in the Old West official website
• Spurs: A Tale in the Old West on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: July 27, 2014

The perfect theme

When I first read the back of the box for the Lone Ranger Shuffling the Deck Card Game from Wizkids, the game play seemed perfect for the theme. Cards represent characters moving between the cars of a train, trying to put themselves in an advantageous position to collect the most silver and win the game. The climactic action scene in the film takes place aboard a moving train, so it seemed that more thought than usual was put into a game that was really just a piece of merchandise for a big summer movie.

The game is as advertised: each player secretly controls two or three (depending on the number of players) of the nine characters. These characters are laid out on the table in a row, with each position representing a train car. At the beginning of each turn, an adventure card is flipped over, showing what will happen at the end of that turn. Usually, characters in the positions indicated on the card gain silver, but just as often they can be pinned (not allowed to gain silver until unpinned by a player) or robbed by the characters around them.

The object of the game is to use movement cards to maneuver your characters into the positions that will gain the most silver. An additional goal is to keep the characters you control a secret for as long as possible, because if another player correctly guesses one of your characters, they get half of that character's silver.

It's a reasonably entertaining game for $10, and as I mentioned earlier, the game play fits the theme very well. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that the Shuffling the Deck Card Game series is Wizkids' "fill in the blank" generic game for licensed properties! It was first released as a Pirates of the Cursed Seas game (using artwork from the strategy game with the punch-out pirate ships), and there have since been versions for The Hunger Games and Pacific Rim.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) Considering that it is mainly a piece of tie-in merchandise, this game is surprisingly engaging.

Date played: March 1, 2014

I wanna be a cowboy

I love the western genre, and I love a good collectible card game. So far, Deadlands: Doomtown is the only game to successfully combine these things, and it has such a huge supernatural horror element to it that it is really more like a fantasy setting with western trappings than it is a true historical western.

So I was very interested when Wizkids (publishers of Heroclix) announced High Stakes Drifter in 2005, their first collectible card game, and since the CCG market was starting to dry up at the time, there wasn't much competing for our attention.

It was nearly 10 years ago, but I remember liking High Stakes Drifter. It had a purely western setting, with no fantasy elements at all. It used historical photographs for the card illustrations and included characters from history such as Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. In addition to the cards, the game used custom poker chips printed with text that affects the game.

We hadn't played the game since 2005, and after our re-examination of it, it was pretty clear why. Thinking back, I recall that a lot of the marketing for this game attempted to cash in on the Texas Hold'em poker craze that was sweeping the nation at the time. True to that marketing, the game uses several poker elements, including playing character and enhancement cards face down and players betting on whether they will win the round or not.

In fact, the game uses so many elements from poker (and so little else) that I found myself wondering why I wasn't just playing poker, a game which would give me much the same experience without having to purchase more than a $3 deck of playing cards.

As my good friend Robb put it, "playing poker is more fun than whatever it is HSD was trying to do."

Rating: 1 (out of 5) If you know how to play poker you should have no use for this game, and if you don't, poker is easier to learn.

• High Stakes Drifter on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: February 6, 2014

Cowboys and monsters

The combination of the wild west and supernatural horror seems obvious now, but it was a fairly unique idea in 1996 when the Deadlands role playing game was first unleashed on an unsuspecting gaming public. Its setting, which populates the lawless American west of the 1870s with spell-slinging sorcerers and slavering monsters, was unique and very well developed, and was a natural to get the collectible card game treatment during the CCG boom at the end of the 1990s.

Deadlands: Doomtown revolves around the power struggle over a fictional California mining town that just happens to be sitting on the world's largest deposit of Ghost Rock, the mineral that powers magic in the Deadlands world. Players construct decks around the different factions vying for control of the town, from the greedy Sweetrock Mining Company to the sinister Whateley family to the Law Dogs, who had the unfortunate and probably hopeless job of maintaining law and order.

One of the things that made Deadlands: Doomtown unique was its strong story line, which progressed over the course of the game's expansions and revealed itself through text on the cards and changes to the characters in the game. The game's publishers even used the results of national tournaments to steer the story, with factions that didn't perform well being weakened or even eliminated from the game.

The most unique thing about the game, though, is its poker-based combat system. Each card in the game is printed with a poker suit and value, so when two players get into a shootout, they draw cards based on the strength of their respective posses, and the winner is the one who can make the best five-card poker hand using standard poker rules (with the exception that the legendary Dead Man's Hand of two black aces, two black eights and a Jack of Diamonds will beat even a royal flush).

Unlike most CCGs, Deadlands: Doomtown works best as a multiplayer game. Over the course of the game, players play location cards ("deeds") that provide either income or control (sometimes both). Income is used to pay for locations, weapons and characters ("dudes"), who provide influence. A player wins if he has more control points than any other single player has influence, so the game's balance relies on the players identifying who is in the lead and keeping that player in check. A two player game can end abruptly over a lucky (or unlucky) card draw.

In order to experience the game's superior multiplayer environment, we invited some of our friends over to play. We had a nice range of factions represented in our game:

• The Collegium, a group of mad scientists who need ghost rock to power their bizarre steampunk gadgets;
• The Whateleys, an inbred family of sorcerers straight out of H. P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror;
• The Black Jacks, a gang of outlaws;
• The Agency, government spooks from back east who are trying to keep a lid on things.

Our two friends hadn't played Deadlands: Doomtown before, but they are both experienced gamers and picked it up pretty quickly. We had a good time exploring the game's unique mechanics and setting, but the game did take several hours to play and we identified two major flaws in an otherwise well-designed game.

The rules governing how characters move from place to place are confusing and counter-intuitive (even to those of us who have been playing the game for years).

More critically, conflict in the game doesn't always come naturally. It's too easy for players to just have their characters hide out at their high-control locations, and it often takes a player just wanting to stir things up to get some action going.

However, the great things about Deadlands: Doomtown such as the unique poker-based combat system, the intriguing setting, and the colorful cast of characters, far outweigh the flaws in the game's design. It's a game I really wish we had the opportunity to play more often, and I would love to see an enterprising publisher pick it up and do something with it.

Rating: 4 (out of 5) Deadlands: Doomtown is an incredibly immersive game, even by collectible card game standards. Unfortunately its nature as a collectible game makes it difficult to find players willing to get into it, and it really needs at least 3 or 4 players for a satisfying game.

• Deadlands: Doomtown on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 27, 2013

UPDATE: Alderac Entertainment Group recently announced that they will be bringing Doomtown back, using the Living Card Game format made popular by Fantasy Flight Games with Call of Cthulhu, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Netrunner, and others. More information on Doomtown Reloaded can be found here.

The sheriff shot me

Bang! is one of my favorite games that I never play. The box says it can play with 4-7 players (3-8 if you have the Dodge City expansion), but the four player version doesn't balance very well, so it really needs five or more players to be a satisfying game experience. It's also one of those games that tends to polarize gamers: they either love it or they hate it, so rounding up five or more people who want to play can be a challenge. For our game we co-opted our weekly role playing game group, most of whom like the game and have played it before.

The game simulates all the drama and tension of a climactic spaghetti western shootout. Each player is given a role: the Sheriff, the Deputy, the Renegade, and two or more Outlaws. All the roles are kept secret except for the Sheriff (even his own deputy), and each one has its own victory condition, so you never really know the other players' motivations. You can just imagine them all squinting at each other across a dusty street, sizing each other up.

Cards represent shots, dodges, weapons, horses, and other trappings of the genre, that will either help or hinder the players as they try to achieve their victory. The Sheriff must get rid of the Renegade and all the Outlaws, the Deputy must keep the Sheriff alive, the Outlaws win collectively if the Sheriff dies, and the Renegade must be the last man standing in order to win.

Additionally, each player is given a character to play, with a unique ability that gives the game some extra variety.

To make the spaghetti western theme even more pronounced, the game was originally published in Italy, so all the card titles are in Italian, making them look like the credits to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The action is pretty fast paced, with enough wrinkles to keep it interesting. In one of our games, I was left holding the Dynamite card, which travels around the table until it randomly explodes. The player playing the Sheriff shot me dead rather than end up with the Dynamite...

Rating: 4 (out of 5) I think Bang! is a thrilling western action game, one of the surprisingly few on the market. The only barrier to playing it a lot is the relatively large number of players required.

• Bang! official website (you'll need a translator unless you can read Italian)
• Bang! on BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 2, 2013

A fistful of western clichés

The premise of Z-Man Games' B-movie card game series is relatively simple: each player attempts to put together a movie using cards representing characters, props and locations. Players then attack each others' movies using creature cards (representing villains). Special Effect cards can be played at any time to affect the game in various ways. The game ends when a player plays one of the two Roll the Credits cards in the 120 card deck, at which time players total up the points on their cards in play to see who won.

For an added bit of fun, the bottom of each card is printed with a keyword. At the start of the game the top six cards are drawn, from which the players as a group create a movie title. Those cards are then shuffled back into the deck, and at the end of the game, they are worth five extra points each if they are in a player's hand or in their movie on the table.

Our movie title was Shane Colt: Renegade Sheriff in Colorado Justice!

Z-Man published 10 of these games between 2001 and 2009, with each one focusing on a particular movie genre. Bushwhakin' Varmints Out of Sergio's Butte was the eighth to be published, and as you might imagine, it covers westerns, particularly the low-budget American westerns of the 1950s and the Italian spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and '70s.

At its core this is a battle game, with a structure that of most collectible card games such as Magic: the Gathering, albeit in a simplified and more fast-paced form. Players establish defenses via characters, props and locations, attack other players' cards with creatures and villains, and interrupt play using special effect cards that provide unforeseen twists. The real fun of the game is in the humorous quotes on the cards, depicting real and imagined lines from movies that poke fun at the genre and its common tropes.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) The game play doesn't really fit the theme, but it's still a good fast paced game, and the humor makes up for a lot of its shortcomings.

Unfortunately, it appears that the only B-movie game that Z-Man still has in print is Berserker Halflings.

• Bushwhakin' Varmints Out of Sergio's Butte at BoardGameGeek.com

Date played: December 1, 2013