Anyone playing the Boot Hill rules (1975)?

[6mmfan]

Our local club is planning to have a game of the original 1975 rules Boot Hill as a fun nostalgic end of year game. Is anyone still playing these and do you have any advice? Most of the info on the interweb I have seen are for the 3rd edition.

[Cat]

No advice to give, but go for it!
 
I don't play Western games often; but this is the game when I do, these are the rules I pull out and refresh on how the heck they work again.

[Inkpaduta]

Yes, I still use them. Great rules.
No advice on using them.

[6mmfan]

Ok thanks, they don't look too bad, just a bit of maths involved with all the percentages. I like that a play has one main character with optional henchmen.

[6mmfan]

Well we played our first game of Boothill (1975) and it was a blast with lots of fast and furious action. One of the players made up some nice cards with the characters stats which helped speed up the game and we barely looked at the rules as they are pretty simple. One of the things I liked alot about the game was playing individual figures instead of a whole posse, and how well it worked as a multi player game which kept everyone engaged. We are already planning further games.

A couple of rules tweaks we discussed afterwards was the -10 for multiple shots meant towards the end of the game everyone was doing this, so we will try -20 next time. Also there is an 20% chance of being shot in the head when hit, and almost half the characters died this way so we will reduce that down a bit.

Here's some photos for the game although I got pretty involved and stopped taking them during the game. The scenario was based on the gun fight at the OK Coral with the bank robbers trying to steal the money, but the lawmen couldn't start shooting unless they had had a drink or being shot at. And there was a funeral procession from the hotel to the church which blocked progress of the lawmen and robbers.

The hotel in the foreground and the funeral procession.


The bank robberies on the roof of the bank


The procession blocking LOS to the robbers


Dead bodies littering the main street.


The robber carrying the gold being gunned down by the sheriff and a win to the lawmen

[The_Beast]

Sorry, haven't played since that was the only set.

Only thing I do remember is throwing dynamite sounds cool, but ill-advised...

Doug

[79thPA]

I haven't played them in decades.  If memory serves, they would be a little clunky for large games.

How did it go?

[Warren Abox]

Great looking table.  These older games have so much charm, and the mechanics have some real treats in them.

They didn't manage to get figures onto the table, but friends of mine recently played out a Braunstein style RPG session of Boot Hill in the fictional town of Brozeros (link). Full details on the link and don't let the ko-fi address fool you, it's a free post.

We've found that adopting the more Diplomacy-style RPG elements to generate gunfights makes for some really interesting tabletop scenarios. The fights are usually pretty bloody because people generally don't push all their chips into the pile unless they really think they can win.  On the other hand, the nature of on-going campaigns has a balancing effect all it's own, as people are much more likely to pull out of encounters they find out are unbalanced, the better to fight again another day.

[CapnJim]

Boy, we played quite a bit of Boot Hill back in the proverbial day.  I still have the rules and some characters.  My brother and I last played it a couple years ago.

It always struck me as not quite a wargame, and not quite a full-fledged RPG, but somewhere in between the two.  You did well playing it with that amount of figures...

[mweaver]

Awesome table!

Played Boot Hill in the early early 80s.  Our problem was we had been playing D&D - very much in hack and slash mode - for a couple of years prior to our BH experience, and were in the mindset that gunfights should be common.  So our BH characters never lasted very long...

-Michael

[FifteensAway]

Never played the rules.  But love the look of the game.  And two things I've never seen before in a tabletop western - a funeral procession (going to have to copy that one somehow!) and a man playing a piano on a wagon as part of that procession (going to have to rethink how I base one of my pianos - just in case I want to do that in a game, certainly be good for a bull and bear fight inspired by Paint Your Wagon - I have a bull but he is going to need to be replaced on the three cattle stand, plenty of bears). 

I am fully set on Fistful of Lead for my Old West but have been thinking how best to include/play out/resolve straight mano-a-mano gun fights within a FFOL game that is more than just a simple dice roll.  So welcome ideas on that front.

Now, back to that procession - I have some standing banjo players in my Old West saloon stuff already and I have a couple of ACW bands that have been sitting primed but forlorn for a rather long number of years.  Now I have a specific use for them.  And I think I will be 'rescuing' some more of the fancy dress ladies and men from the 'discard stash' to be painted in more sombre tones - keeping the others already set aside for lighter moods.  And, if not obvious, my funeral procession will be more non-Mexican thus the sombre tones.  But there is at least one spare dancing girl who might add some color if painted in a more "Mexican" palette so maybe a mix of sombre and colorful might be in order; and there are some additional Mexican civilians in that discard stash to consider recruiting back.  Hmm.  I do have coffins. 

So, thanks for sharing the game - and the ideas!  I don't mind upping the painting burden for really cool concepts.  Boy, have you got my mental gears clanking and turning.

[Cat]

Yes, that funeral procession is a great way to upgrade the Magnificent Seven funeral!