A Fistful of Lead – AAR

Thanks to a couple of days off, I could finish the Mexican Revolution stuff far enough to have a first game. We set up a sleepy village, K. took the Zapatistas and I got the Federales.

I decided to get my jefe and two of his guys to work up the left flank, while another guy and a soldadera were to position themselves behind the wall and guard the right flank. Fearlessly, K. led her troops forward, while her female leader waved her hat encouragingly.

As the shooting was about to start, the inhabitants made themselves scarce.

K. had one guy with a shotgun, who worked his way around the church to attack my right flank.

Having positioned themselves behind the wall, my guys were still confident.

However, a couple of shots threw my soldadera in panic, who, when pinned, failed the recover test catastrophically and fled the field. This, as we will see, was a wise and foresightful decision. The federal soldier stood his ground and even fired back, but the Zapatista with the shotgun had nerves of steel. Disregarding cover, he ran forward and killed my soldiers with a salvo from his gun.

¡Ay, caramba! My right flank was gone! Things weren’t going much better on my left flank. A well-placed bullet hit my jefe, who bit the dust. Angrily, one of my soldiers wanted to take revenge and jumped on a pile of crates to get a clear LOS and finish off K.’s leader. In the excitement however, he dropped his bullets and was out of ammo!

Of course, being exposed, he was pretty quick disposed of by another hail of Zapatista bullets.

It was now down to the last man, but I decided to sell his life dearly. I managed to take down one of K.’s men, but was then gunned down by the combined firepower of her remaining three guys.

We had great fun with this fast and rather brutal game. We both very much like the card activation mechanic, which gives a good ‘Western’ feeling and which also has more tactical depth than one might think at the first glance. The rules are easy to remember and the game goes along at a fast pace, which is very fitting to the genre. I think that the rules and especially the activation mechanic come into their own with multiple players, so I’ll get the Americanos painted as soon as possible and then I’ll try to rope in some other players to have a chaotic shoot-out.