Go West, Young Man

At the end of last year three of us at our club decided that we'd do a project this year. This is a bold move for me, since I'm awful at projects. But the other two are pretty good at getting stuff done, so I reasoned that if I fell by the wayside then at least we'd still get some games.

Anyway, we're going to have a dabble with the Wild West. The plan is to give 'What A Cowboy' a try. We like the mechanisms of 'What A Tanker', so it seemed a good starting point. And if it doesn't work out we'll have figures and scenery to use for another set of rules. That's the fun when you go non-proprietary.

Anyway in order to get ourselves started we all invested in a few boxes of the 28mm plastic multi-pose figures from Great Escape Games. Putting some of those together will give us some basic forces to play with and then, if we feel inclined, we can look for more specialised sets and individuals.

In an incredible (for me) burst of activity I actually put a few of them together over the break - the boxes I have will give me ten male and ten female gunfighters in total. And, against the odds, I even painted some of them.

Here's my first batch.

They were actually surprisingly fun (and easy) to paint, although I haven't tried any stripes or checks on clothing yet.

These two are a couple of generic gunfighters. Could be good guys. Could be bad guys. 

This one is the Orinoco Kid.

I'll leave you to look up where he's from.

These were the first two I painted. They're inspired by a couple of minor characters from the TV series 'Godless', which we watched over Christmas. On the left is German artist Martha Bischoff. And accompanying her is the Pinkerton agent Webster.

I have a few more figures assembled and undercoated, and one that's just awaiting a final wash and some basing.. They're quite fun to paint one at a time. 

Hopefully we'll all have enough figures for a game to try out the rules in a few weeks.