It's been delayed a few days due to just having busy evenings, but I finally got the table cleared off tonight and set up to test drive Rattrap Productions' ".45 Adventure (1st edition) using one of the sample adventures in the book - "Shootout in the Park!"
In this thrilling installment, the Green Hornet and Kato are in hot pursuit of "Little" Bobby DiMarco and his henchmen, Perfect Tommy and Fat Paulie. Little Bobby was fleeing the Hornet with an armful of ledgers detailing bribes made to various public officials. As they crossed the park, the ledgers were fumbled - and now both the Hornet and DiMarco are trying to find them.
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| It's a gritty '80s reboot of the Green Hornet, with Uzis instead of Tommy Guns. |
The Hornet won initiative on the first round, and everyone began spreading out to investigate the six clue markers spread across the table (laid out after I took a picture of the setup!). Pretty soon, clue markers were flying off the table - two revealed police snipers that took ineffectual pot shots, two were duds, and Fat Paulie stumbled across one of the ledgers without realizing what it was.
Confronting Little Bobby, the Hornet fired a soporific shot from his gas gun, which the mobster backpedaled away from.
Meanwhile, Perfect Tommy and Kato converged on the clue marker hiding the second ledger.
The Hornet dodged away from DiMarco's bullets, right into the ham-sized fists of Fat Paulie. With the Hornet distracted, DiMarco dashed after the ledger that Fat Paulie had overlooked.
While the Hornet eventually managed to duck out of the way long enough to give Fat Paulie a faceful of knockout gas, and Kato pummeled Perfect Tommy into giving up and fleeing the battlefield, leaving the ledger behind. Unfortunately, it was enough time for DiMarco to flee with his half of the ledgers.
With only half the information needed to bring to DA Scanlon, the Hornet was forced to concede that this adventure had been...a draw!
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I'm calling that a really successful test play. There were a few things I found myself having to adjudicate because they either just weren't covered in the rules or the text was unclear. All in all, I think the game only took about 45 minutes; I'm excited to put this on on Saturday for my friend Dave, who's a Green Hornet fan.
Figures Acquired in 2025: 167
Figures Painted in 2025: 150
Great looking wee game!
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to hear what you thought of the rules themselves and how straight forward or otherwise you found them!
The mechanics are mostly very straightforward, but the book really could have used another editorial pass or two. There are a few points where attributes changed names but not every instance was caught and corrected, for example. It's a bit unclear how submachine guns work, so I had to kind of puzzle out that they don't throw out multiple shots per se; they just increase the likelihood that you score a "hit" on your target. In play, things went pretty smoothly and I found myself not having to stop and look things up much past the first 15 minutes or so.
DeleteI do really like the way it handles figures taking damage; each character has a stat block that includes a hit location chart (Head, Torso, Arms, Legs), the attributes tied to each location, and how those attributes degrade with each hit taken at that location. After a certain point, hits at each location render the target unconscious/dead, or incapacitated enough to largely be out of the fight; for example, multiple hits to the arms won't kill the target but renders them unable to fight or carry objects.
All in all, I'd probably give these rules a 3.5 out of 5. I'm certainly open to playing with them more!
Cool looking game, Bill!
ReplyDeleteThanks Ray!
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