Handfull Of Quarters game

[Legionaire22]

   Please bear with me as I try and figure out how to post a picture.

[Tom Reed]

That is one sweet layout! Did you create the mat yourself? What are the dimensions? I love a town with more than one street, and I sepecially like the way your main street bends instead of being straight. I also like that it looks like you have some houses and the town isn't just made up of saloons, merchants, a bank, and a jail.

[Bugsda]

Yep! What Tom said, excellent town 

[Legionaire22]

Holy crap!!! It worked!!!

   Ok, where to start? Last Saturday I ran a SnS game at Legends In The Fall in Wauconda, Il. I had a great time at their game day, and I was really impressed with the hospitality of everyone there.
   The game I ran was called "A Handful Of Quarters". It is my version of Fistful of Dollars with a few modifications. Essentially you have two gangs in a town that each want to kill the other. Oh and you have Joe (Clint) sleeping in a chair on the balcony of the hotel. The rules for the scenario are that the gangs have 10 turns for one gang to completely eliminate the other. If at the end of the 10 turns both gangs are still alive Joe wakes up from his nap and goes on a killing spree. At that point it is everyone still alive against Joe. Also, if anyone is foolish enough to shoot at Joe he wakes up and begins the slaughter.
   I have run this scenario several times using Desperadoes and it usually ends with one gang frantically killing the last members of the other gang on turn nine to avoid Joe's wrath, or it ends with Joe killing most everyone on the table. In this game, however, things went awry. As both gangs jockeyed for position around the town, and traded shots at gradually decreasing ranges, a hired gun in the outlaw gang slowly advanced on sleeping Joe.
   On turn four, to the shock of most of the players, the hired gun took a shot at sleeping Joe. Sleeping Joeand Awake Joe

   At this point in time Joe turned into Barney Fife. I ran Joe and anyone who knows me will tell you that any dice I touch are cursed. Joe shot at a hired gun at point blank range eight times over two cards and did not kill him. For the scenario I gave Joe the ability to shrug off the first wound, and I gave him a save of 5+ on a d8 for all wounds. With that said, I missed every save but one. After Joe failed to kill the hired gun with his second card (of four) a Soiled Dove walked up and flashed him causing him to be shocked and lose his next card. Then on her next card she shot and killed him.
   The game continued after Joe's demise as if he was never even there. The area behind the Chinese Laundry and the General Store quickly became known as the alley of death, as three bodies piled up side by side in it. The Thug took the storekeep hostage but had his brains blown all over the groceries by a lawman with a shotgun.
   The lawman gang quickly got the upper hand and the final two turns looked like the final scene from Open Range, where the townsfolk are chasing down the last bad guy.
   All in all it was a great game. Everyone had fun and I met some new friends.


      Jim

[Elbows]

That town is...amazing!     Of course I may be biased, as I have most of the same buildings, but I wish I had a mat as nice as that one.  One of these days I'll stop being lazy and do something about that.   

For SnS I'd imagine 10 turns is probably a bit much for a scenario like that - did you chop down the turns?  I think most of my convention games end up running 4-5 turns, simply because of how much happens in a turn.  What character as Sleeping Joe? The Drifter?

How big were the opposing sides?

[Legionaire22]

Ok, maybe I don't have the picture thing figured out completely yet. Practice...Practice...Practice...

[Furt]

A very nice town! Sounds like you had a very exciting game.

All in all it was a great game. Everyone had fun and I met some new friends.

What more could you want? 

[Elk101]

Great town! I have mine planned on paper and this is just like what I want to do. Lovely job 

[Legionaire22]

Thanks for the comments on the mat but I can't take the credit myself.  I stole the idea from Elbows because he had a picture posted on one of the first pages about SnS. I liked it so stole the idea.   The mat is nothing more than material on top from JoAnn Fabrics and felt on the bottom.  Then I used masking tape to tape off where I wanted the streets to be then used a medium brown spray paint as a base and highlighted with a light brown. Its about 6' wide and 7' long, and I still can't fit all my old west buildings on it. The town itself is still a work in progress.  I have several building signs to finish, and I am currently painting furniture to go in every room in the town (beds, dressers, pot bellied stoves, etc). These will be held down with removable sticky tape.  

Even with the catastrophe with Joe the game still lasted 8 turns.  4-5 might not have been enough for this scenario.  There were 8 figures on each side which is about the biggest game I run. All-in-all it took just under 4 hours.

Yes, Sleeping Joe's character was the Drifter.
 

[philhendry]

What a lovely, yet simple, set-up!  I'm impressed.

[Legionaire22]

This was the alley of death.

[Elbows]

Ah, okay - yeah with 16 characters on the table that's actually a pretty big SnS game.  Also you can zip through a bunch of turns if the two sides need to close on each other.  I plan on running 9 vs. 9 at the convention in PA which will be a bit of a test (though there were be various entry points on the map so action will happen quickly).

Love the table, really top class stuff.  My last "slowly but surely" task is to likewise stock all of the rooms with furniture.  That'll be some time comin'!

If you have more pictures, please do post them.  Love soaking up a good game of Old West!

[Legionaire22]

I am running the same scenario tomorrow at Flat Con in Bloomington, Il. Hopefully I can post an AAR on it tomorrow night with some better pictures (these were taken on a cell phone). It will be interesting to see how different the games turn out.

[Hu Rhu]

Excellent Western Town setup.     Looks like you have a long project in hand.      Looking forward to the updates.