Desperado!

I've just returned from a few weeks over in the UK. This has been my first trip back there in sixteen years, so was very much taken up in spending time with family and friends, most of whom I'd not seen at all in that time. However I was lucky enough to fit in a couple of sessions of wargaming, even if I wasn't able to make it to a meeting of my old club in Staines.

This post covers my first outing; an evening at the October Wargames Club in Birmingham, courtesy of my brother Phil. 

Looks like a typical wargames club.

There were games of Warhammer, plus at least a couple of Bolt Action.

However I had been promised an evening with Phil's 'Nerd Mates' playing the Wild West game, 'Desperado'. As someone who was spending the first week of the holiday living on adrenaline, caffeine and paracetamol (thanks to a combination of a cold picked up on the flight over and some rather emotional reunions), a simple game was just the ticket. And Desperado is pretty simple. To be fair, Finney (red shirt) did the running of the game and we just said what we wanted to do. Perfect.

We started with a simple free-for-all gunfight, to get everyone into the swing of thing. Here's my character, who I named Romeo McFlourish*

Romeo moves out into the street, as the shooting stars elsewhere.

Some action around the water-tower.

(OK, I didn't take any notes and this game was played two weeks ago and 10,000 miles from where I am now. I don't recall a lot of what happened)

Romeo takes cover behind some crates and manages to score a hit on another gunfighter to the left of the picture.

Someone died. He had a red shirt so in a way it was inevitable.

Romeo's target didn't like being shot, and came at him with a knife. I mean who brings a knife to a gunfight? Someone who knows how to use it apparently; he stuck it right through Romeo's chest, killing him instantly.

Damn!

No idea what is going on here; it looks like one of the fighters it head-butting a door.

Anyway, with everyone in the right mood we switched to a simple scenario. Outside the church was a potential bride, and a pastor. Both armed, because this is a rough town.

Everyone had a vested interest in either seeing the bride married, kidnapped or remaining single. There was room for alliances and conflict and to be honest I can't remember who was trying to do what.

I had a cattle-baron who was quite keen not to see the bride married to her potential bridegroom (who was elsewhere on the table), but rather married to him. So I had to marry here then and there, or get her off the table to my ranch.

I used the same figure as before, this time names Burt Handsome.

Burt lasted about as long as it took for him to poke his head around a corner. But we were allowed new characters with the same goal, so Burt's eldest son Brad Handsome set out to get married.

Here he is taking a pop at the guy who shot his Pa.

The actual bridegroom made it to the church. The marriage party quickly rushed inside.

There was a quick ceremony and the bride became a wife. I noticed a side door to the church, opened it and turned the wife into a widow. My plan was then to rush inside, grab the widow and escape out of the side-door before the others caught on to what was happening.

Unfortunately the pastor was not impressed with my approach to dating, and blew my head off with a shotgun.

In order to end the evening we didn't assign new characters to people at that point, and the game ended in a few more deaths and injuries, before we decided that we'd all had a jolly good time.

After that we engaged in a grand English tradition and went out for a curry. This featured a naan the size of a duvet.

Thank you to Phil, his nerd mates and the other members of the club for making this foreign visitor (of a sort) welcome at their meeting.

*A Google of the names of the characters in these games will show what a large portion of my TV viewing was whilst on holiday. I'd like to blame it on our having a 2 1/2 year old in our group, but to be honest I enjoyed every moment of it myself.