Fistful of Lead: Under the Blood Moon

 I finally got another demo game of Fistful of Lead going at my local game store, Harlequin Hobby, today. A guy was nice enough to drive out to Buffalo from Rochester for it, and in a few weeks' time I'll return the favor and drive out to Rochester so he can run a demo game of Test of Honour for me, which I'm looking forward to. 

I put on the scenario "Under the Blood Moon," out of the "Tales of Horror" expansion; I played Werewolves, and my opponent took control of Lefty LaRue and his band of intrepid Canadian monster hunters. 

As an aside, right after I got things set up, one of the Warhammer 40K players in the store came over, examined the table, looked directly at the cover of the Fistful of Lead rulebook, and asked me if this was Trench Crusade. I tried giving him the spiel of what Fistful of Lead was and how it played, but his eyes glazed right over and he wandered away pretty quickly. Ah well.

Half the hunters (in this case, Lefty himself, Sgt. Blaine of the RCMP, and a trio of stalwart but largely-ineffectual Mounties - a Grunt Group, in the parlance of the game) were in the cabin in the center of the table, while each turn after the first my opponent would roll to see if the remaining two (Quinn the Eskimo and Frenchie Sinclair) would arrive by the main road. Meanwhile, my werewolves would be trying to get into the cabin and eat the delicious hunters and lumberjack family inside. The game would end automatically at the end of the 7th turn as the sun rose and drove the werewolves away. 

The first few turns were a bit of a stalemate; the werewolves rolled abysmally while trying to break down the doors to the cabin, and my opponent rolled really high while trying to bring his reinforcements on to the board. Once Quinn and Frenchie arrived, however, they quickly started stacking Shock and Wound tokens on to the leader of the Werewolf pack.

I didn't take a lot of pictures during the game.

Two of the lesser werewolves ended up fleeing the table due to poor Recovery rolls while trying to shrug off the Shock tokens they were accumulating from the rifles of Lefty and the Mounties, and the pack leader actually succumbed to his wounds while trying to stand back up. With the sun rising at the end of the 7th turn, Lefty and Quinn finished off the last werewolf. One Mountie had fled the table due to a failed Recovery roll, and one had been eaten by a werewolf, but the named characters in the hunter group were all unscathed. 

All in all, a really good game. My opponent and I agreed that if I'd succeeded in breaking down a door into the cabin on turn 2 or 3, the game likely would have gone very differently and might have been a win for the werewolves. He had a great time, and said he'd likely be adding Fistful of Lead to his library. So a day well spent!