Yesterday, blogger Pooch and I played a new game! Well, we played cowboys, which we have done many times, but with a new ruleset - Dead by Lead from Electi Studios.
Why a new game? Well, we broke Legends of the Old West many moons ago and then we got stuck into Dead Mans Hand and I definitely ruined that with a horde of Mexican Peons so since then, the cowboys have been in a box.
In a nutshell?
Dead by Lead is, thematically, very much of it's type. Lawmen and outlaws robbing banks, jailbreaking and having shootouts at the Okie Dokie Corral. However, it has some clever design features in it's very clean and simple rules that mean playing warbands of Native Americans fit easily alongside Banditos or soldiers or anything else you can imagine. List building comes with character customisation for being both awesome and terrible and crews can be anything from 1 to 12 models. Yep. One. And that one man can still be shot in the head and killed instantly.
There's a small variety of models like Scouts, Drifters and Leaders. They have Iron and Brawl stats for shooting and fighting respectively, Grit covers off how many wounds they can take and Luck gives them the opportunity to have the bullet whip their hats off and miss! The game tracks ammo and wound locations and both matter but it's light enough that the admin can be done with the included character sheet and a few spare dice.
The game uses D12s for shooting, fighting and lucking and a deck of cards for figuring out how hard you are to hit. It's an interesting addition to the mechanic that provides a level of more controlled randomness and allows for a much simpler combat mechanic. The defender draws a card and the attacker rolls a D12 + stat +/- other variables and if they equal or beat the card, they deal damage. In cover? Draw two, take the best. In serious cover? Draw three. Draw the same cards? Add them together. It's very, very cool.
The rules include half a dozen scenarios, including Wild West staples like a jailbreak and a train robbery and a campaign system to carry your fighters between games. Dead by Lead is available on Wargames Vault.
How did the game go?
Great! Pooch bought four soldiers variously armed and I bought three Banditos and two Peons. All our characters had some flaws (and this is where we learned 'Fast and scrawny' and 'Drunkard' are both quite back breaking flaws!) and we opted to not play a scenario but just turned up in town to have a scrap. We each bought a longarm - Pooch's was a dimwit (so always went last) and mine was big and slow (so had better stats but moved way too slowly to be helpful.)
The game flowed really easily and while we looked up every rule once (mostly from the 'I think I read something that says we should do a thing' in our pre-game reading) the mechanics are so simple that once we'd played through a couple of fights and shoots, it wasn't especially difficult.
We learned quite early that close combat is deadly (and that cavalry sabres don't do anything unless you're on a horse) and that getting into optimal range for fanning means your fan is likely to go badly but it's SO satisfying. In a spectacular example of how the 'fanning' rules work, this tableau played out over the whole game.
Pooch's soldier and my drunken bandito fanned their sixguns at each other over a three or four turns and managed to do a single wound each. In the end, the soldier ran around the water wagon and battered the Mexican into submission! In the end, the gameboard came out like this:
The bandito leader was gunned down in the street by the army captain, before his big, slow gunner shot the captain in the head and was in turn felled by the dimwit who finally made it to somewhere sensible.
Things I liked
Mechanics
The cards for spinning up a defence stat is a really neat mechanic. Interestingly, we observed after the game that the odds of pulling a 10 were pretty good. Something around 40% which means shooting things dead is genuinely quite difficult. Given most of the time the best shooting bonus we ever got was +3 it was tough to reliably hit. Our long-arm fighters spent most of the game taking potshots and doing nothing. Pooch pointed out that in this game a sixgun costs more than most of the men carrying them (which doesn't feel wrong!) and so shooting being hard to hit, but fairly brutal when you did, is very much in keeping with the vibe.
Customisations
After the game, Pooch and I mucked around with the customisations to see if we could make The Man with No Name, Angel Eyes and Tuco (ie. Good, Bad and Ugly) and we definitely could. So I have that list sitting there waiting for our next game. Good is an amazing shot, Bad is all around savage and Ugly is tough as nails. It definitely fits!
Bloggers Tank and Scotty both mused on things they could build including the Cartwrights from Bonanza and we mucked around with creating a truly epic Clint Eastwood as well and a single gunslinger could definitely be made to work. Django (the original, the Takeshi Miike Japanese one and the Tarantino one) would all be great inspirations for crews.
All this also adds a flavour to the game that helps - I used a model carrying a sixgun and a bottle of hooch so he could hardly not be a drunkard!
Things I didn't like
Nothing really. It's a neat game and we'll definitely be playing some more and exploring what we can make it do. Being able to roll out the Good, the Bad and the Ugly will be genuinely fun.
Overall?
Really pleased. Dead by Lead looks like it has loads of depth, plenty of customisation options and a ruleset that's super simple. The included campaign system has the most savage post-game injury tables I've ever seen (death is a very very real possibility!) and the kind of fun income earning shenanigans that older gamers might remember from GWs first incarnation of Necromunda. If Cowboys are your thing, I'd definitely recommend it.
Next Time
Back to the brushes. I'm trying to get back into painting my 15mm Renaissance Spanish.
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