You're my huckleberry

One of my local games clubs has recently started to run a Wild West campaign using the very successful Dead Man’s Hand, using the campaign rules from Legends of Dead Man’s Hand. As the campaign had just started I asked if I could join in. “No problem” said Paul B, the organiser. Cool! That’ll make a change to Napoleonics…

Now for the BIG question “What faction should I use?”. The campaign was already pretty full with Lawmen, Cowboys, Indians and Mexicans. One young lad is even using a Ned Kelly gang from the DMH Down Under book!  So ideally, I wanted to choose something different from the rest and ideally a faction which wouldn’t involve much (or ideally any) painting. 

I already have quite a large collection of cowboys, native Americans and US Cavalry to hand, as a decade ago I ran (with my fellow gamers Paul Houghton and Jason Ralls) a Battle of Little Bighorn game for Legends of the Old West at Gamesday 2005. This was back in the good ol’ days when Warhammer Historical existed and Games Workshop had a Gamesday, but that was then… The lads of the fated 7th Cavalry hadn’t seen a battle in quite a few years, time to dust them off!

So my gang was chosen: US Cavalry! Led by the able Colonel Saunders - noone was going to call him chicken! Armed with slow loading carbines, my tactic was to be able to snipe at long range and take out my opponents. That should work very nicely if the dice roll up well - or even average. I gained a gunsmith, so equipped my ‘gang’ with pistols (Schofields of course!) and carbines. Okay, calling them Schofields has no effect in the game, but it sounds good. I even adopted a poor attempt at Val Kilmer’s accent from Tombstone, much to the annoyance of the other players. So how did my cavalry do? Well I’ll leave that for a future blog entry, nearer the end of the week.