It's been a long time since my posse, "The Speakers for the Land," got on the table - injuring my knee and bad weather, coupled with the various holidays, kept me from taking part in Dracula's America for a few months. Fortunately, the campaign hasn't progressed much in my absence, so I wasn't hindered beyond needing a few extra reminders of some of the rules.
I played a quick game against Phil, a member of the campaign I hadn't faced off against before, pitting my Skinwalker Tribes posse against his Twilight Order posse - members of a secret society of monster hunters, armed with silver bullets, medieval armor and the possibility of summoning a sixgun-toting angel to the battlefield.
We rolled "Escalation" for our mission - each of us would start with half our posse, rounding down, deploying on the table and in subsequent rounds could use our activations to bring the remainder on to the battlefield. For side agendas, I rolled that one of my posse members would be carrying an important letter and would receipt 1 bonus victory point if I still held it at the end of the game, while Phil had a VIP/hostage with his posse that he needed to maintain possession of to score 2 bonus victory points.
With half-sized posses, the first few turns went quickly, with both of us leaving our corner deployment zones and starting to fan out towards the center of the table. Beyond the agendas, our only goal was to either kill or force a withdrawal of the opposing posse.
Phil drew first blood, injuring Growing Thunder, a Crow tribe woman armed with a rifle and loosely considered second in command of my posse; one of my new recruits, Zeke Freeman, managed to immediately shoot the varmint what done it in the back.
Midgame, we both played the same card when testing for turn order, triggering an event - the occupants of a randomly determined building would shoot at everyone within 6". And wouldn't you know it, the dice came up that the green building - a dentist's office - that almost my entire posse was clustered around was the one that started shooting!
Six out of eight figures I had on the table were within 6". It was brutal.
My two lycanthropes transformed, the chief into a bear and the other into a wolf. The bear unfortunately got gunned down almost immediately (he's a big and tempting target), but the wolf chewed through two members of Phil's posse.
The game ended with me still in possession of my letter and Phil's hostage secure (she, and the figure guarding her, never left Phil's deployment zone), so it came down to who scored the most victory points off of casualties. And when all was said and done, Phil beat me by a single victory point.
Going into the post-game advancement, Growing Thunder sadly succumbed to her wounds and died; Chief Kicking Bird developed a second lasting injury (he'd previously lost an eye, and now has a lingering ache) but everyone else fared pretty well. Zeke's older brother Josiah gained the skill "Lead-Belly," which means his abilities don't deteriorate when he's Shaken, and White Hawk, one of my pistoleers, advanced from Novice to Veteran status, improving his combat abilities.
All in all, a good game, and Chris gifted me a couple of Native American figures that had been in his leadpile.
Miniatures Acquired: 4
Miniatures Painted: 6
Terrain Acquired: 0
Terrain Painted: 0
Scatter Acquired: 0
Scatter Painted: 0
