That's not how you rob a train...

It was club day and we decided that another game of Dead by Lead was required. This time we thought we'd try out robbing a train! Blogger Scotty's Amish Gangsters (yep....) defended the train while Blogger Tank's Apache AND my three-man Western Tribute Band both tried to rob the train!

In the style of the train robbery in Legends of the Old West we gave ourselves horses to make running down the train a little easier. Tank's Apache warriors doubled up on their horses and the two gangs went after the train from both sides!

Both gangs arrived at the train but the Apache made the first move, leaping into the passenger car while the Tribute Band tried to knock out the Amish mercenary, Alice, in the train cab, but she was well protected in the iron cab.

The Tribute Band rode up alongside the train and Tuco fired off all his six gun at Alice, doing a great job of shooting her in the legs! Meanwhile, two Apache warriors had boarded the train. The first wore a shotgun but the second landed on board only to have the Man with No Name take a perfect shot and knock him dead.

Tuco went down immediately to the second barrel of the shotgun and as more Apache boarded the train, the Amish gang leader Ma Baker waded into the fray wielding her cane with fury seeing off a couple of Apache soldiers. The Man with No Name's hat and poncho were riddled with bullet holes from the Amish gangster on the coal car (he was VERY lucky!) but his luck wasn't much chop shooting back.

In the end, Alice was still alive in the engine, Angel Eyes was on the roof of the caboose as the train left the board and the passenger carriage was absolutely awash with blood with dead gangsters and Apache and the couple still standing tripping over the corpses of their comrades. In the end neither the Tribute Band or the Apache managed to loot the train but the Amish didn't defend it so well either. 

It was another hilarious game of Dead by Lead which we all enjoyed. And thanks to Tank, we rocked out the epic train. It was awesome.

Next Time

I've been doing a bit of work to finish up a Combat Patrol of Grey Knights (thanks to Blogger Scotty) so I can finally give 10e 40K a go...

Dead by Lead- Jailbreak!

Following on from a very enjoyable game with McZ, a few of the other Regimenters were keen to try out Dead by Lead too.

So, over the weekend we tried out Scenario 2: Trials and Tribulations. There were three of us, so we changed the scenario up to have one crew coming from one side, the other from the other size, and the defenders in the middle!

Conveniently the 4ground Sherriff's Office has two jail cells, perfect for this game!

A view of the table before the crews were placed and the game began!

On to the game....

"Look Sherriff, I already told your deputy all I know. I was just minding my own business yesterday, when this whole thing went down.

Now now, no need to pull your Iron. I'll tell it you, just.... just keep that in that there holster...

Whisper Creek was quiet, nobody was renting a room at Rogan's, even the saloon was empty. There was a train coming tomorrow, but nobody wanted to be out in town after yesterday.

A couple of the locals had come to blows over who's brand was on a particular set of cattle, which resulted in some words being thrown, and then some bottles, and then a couple of bullets. Now, all of that was normal fare in Whisper Creek, 'cept there turned out to be a troop of Cavalry who were in town, and they decided to make a whole thing out of it.

And so it was, that the two leaders ended up in the cells, waiting for the train to come with the new Sherriff, as well as the car to take the cattle away to Bloodstone to sell.

4ground make SUCH GOOD TERRAIN

Now, the Cavalry didn't reckon on the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Their Sergeant was there, taunting the folks in the cell, unawares that around the town, a whole bunch of trouble was getting all set up ready to start.

Trouble.

When one of the Cav, Jebediah his name was came out of the General Store (after taking more than a few things off the store owner's hands), he was quickly met by a hail of bullets from one of the locals, heading to free their boss. He ducked quickly behind a mule, which saved him, but the mule didn't have the same luck....

RIP Francis the mule

Now, that particular local hadn't reckoned on Butch coming out of the Sheriff's office, with both barrels of the shotgun primed and ready to rock. With an almighty bang, that local was a goner.

Shotgun at close range.

Now, this whole thing had kicked off right royally by this point. From the other side of town, the other group of locals (Ma's Boys) were moving up to the Sherriff's office, intent on getting Ma out.

From the top story, Butch emerged, holding his Winchester Repeater. He took aim at a local hidin' in an unfinished building. He stood up there, paused, and a crack rang out, followed by a hard thump as the feller fell from his hiding spot.

Butch coming out of the Sherriff's office

Butch might be regarded as a pretty good shot, but he was never regarded as a smart man. So while he was there, aiming carefully down the road, making that great shot, what he wasn't doing was looking around him, and seeing the person standing right at the bottom of the stairs, pistol raised in his direction.

The six shooter rang out, six bullets fired faster than a fly beats it's wings.

And that was the end of Butch.

Splat.

While all of this was going on, at the same time the locals had gotten their way into the Sherriff's Office, where one hell of a scuffle was occurin'. The Sergeant was hard pressed, trying to fight off one of the locals, the two tuslin' over a Bowie knife.

Brawl!

Jebediah, hearing that his boss was in trouble came runnin', only to end up on the wrong end of a tomahawk...

More Brawl!

Fightin' in the Office was bloody and brutal. More and more of the locals piled in, first fighting the Cavalry, and then fightin' each other. The Sergeant was overwhelmed, and during all of that, both Ma and the Chief were able to get free.

I don't know whether anyone got out of it, because pretty soon all that was left in that office was a whole bunch of dead and wounded folks, and not a whole lot of anything else.

A ridiculous amount of Brawl

And that's all I know Sherriff, honest. Now can I go...?"

Another brilliant game of Dead by Lead, it remains a ridiculously cinematic and enjoyable game. The rules play quickly and simply, with plenty of opportunities for cinematic elements, and great moments where things did, or didn't work out!

We will for sure be playing more....

Pooch

 

Pooch's October update

October is gone too, this is really, really ridiculous. But still, the painting train continues, and this blog is much more on time. So... I'll take that as a win!

1. Paint a platoon for Flames of War

This month was some odds and sods to finish up my second Afrika Rifle Platoon...

An HMG and a command stand to be exact....

But also painted up some of the 3d Breed DAK that I had Potbelly print for me, to add a couple of extra teams to enable me to use my DAK as an early war army- namely a 50mm mortar and an anti-tank rifle.

Much like everything Potbelly prints for me, they have come out an absolute treat.

More DAK next month I think, as I need to paint up more things for Remember December this year!

2. Add something to armies I have already painted

First up this month is a new model for Marvel Crisis Protocol- or more, three models!

I have actually had these on my painting table for some time, but the models kept breaking on me, and my level of frustration got so high that I very nearly considered never finishing them. The realisation that I didn't have any other Marvel models to replace them meant that I did finish them this month!

So dynamic

So fragile

Rolling with a bit of a Wild West theme this month, I also finished up a couple of Daughters of the West from 3d Breed and printed by Potbelly Miniatures, which I plan on using for Dead by Lead.

Two pistols and a Repeater rifle!

I'm really happy with them

3. Finish up a piece of terrain

Continuing in the Wild West as last month, I built up another one of the brilliant 4Ground kits I had lying around. I've got two more to go before I have them all assembled, so I reckon I might try and do one a month for the next two months to finish them off.

Such a cool looking building

Can't have a jailbreak without a jail cell!

And to further add to the Wild West experience, I also finished up these 3d printed boxes and crates from Battlekiwi.

Simple paintjob, but scatter terrain is so damn useful!

4. Play a game a month, that was different to the last month

As you saw in McZ's review, we played the really fun game, Dead by Lead. 

We deliberately set ourselves a simple "this town ain't big enough for the both of us" type game, wehere all we were doing was trying to kill each other. Read his review if you want the detail, in short, we really enjoyed it.

I do love my Wild West terrain!

3d Breed Cowboy, looking cool

The Cavalry Sgt dealing to on of McZ's Scouts with knife

The result of a VERY silly gunbattle

The dimwit with the Repeater Rifle came up trumps in the end....

It's a great game, I'm already lining up the next game!

5. Paint a Hundred Years War French Army for ADLG

Paint one base for ADLG

And so, the last push on painting up a whole mess of Knights begins- stripy lances for the win!

Paint one Knight for ADLG

I figured I'd better paint up my last commander too, adding further to the push to get more Knights done!

On a prancing pony no less!

Paint up an army of 15mm Celts

You know how I said I wanted to finish my 15mm Celt army in October? 

Well, I did it...

Here is the army in all it's glory!

And some close ups of the things I finished this month....

Two bases of Soldurii, you can tell it's them by the dogs!

Two more generals

Some heavy cavalry

And a base with a certain call back to a certain RPG campaign....

Potbelly Miniatures have done a phenomenal job in printing all of these for me, they have come up an absolute treat. I really should get them out for a game!

Pooch

Dead by Lead! What do we think?

 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.