Fire and Brimstone

I had an excellent weekend playing varios games against my friend James. We continued our campaign of Shadows of Brimstone, the Wild-West-Monsters-in-a-Goldmine simulator (I was going to refer to it as "Cowboys in a Dungeon", but that doesn't sound right somehow). It's rather like Advanced Heroquest with six-shooters, and has the right combination of fun and depth to be engrossing but quick.

We have completed the six "basic" missions now, and at long last the two mysterious strangers that we control have names. They are Sherrif Meatballs and Doc Casserole, and two meaner hombres have never crossed the minions of Cthulhu. Rumour has it that Casserole and Meatballs were responsible for collecting the bounties on Kid Crouton and "Waiter" Bill Please.

Doc Casserole and Suzy Stew, hungry for justice.

One of the joys of Brimstone is that each of the rules makes sense on its own, but when put together they can produce slightly ludicrous results. Hence the tendency of everyone you encounter in the mine to explode after they have attacked you and/or given you a present, or the strange incident where a randomly generated pile of bones produced a randomly generated mysterious child who produced a lantern, gave us a randomly generated free gift and then exploded. And, of course, the noble sherrif's four-day trip to the saloon to watch dancing girls, in order to acquire more experience points. Somehow I can't imagine a sherrif getting the right sort of experience from a four-day binge of whiskey, floozies and feather boas, but it sounds worth a try.

We also played Dystopian Wars (are there utopian wars? I have my doubts), which involved big ships blasting the big ship out of one another. It's remarkably quick and ferocious, and the miniatures were much better than I expected them to be. It's really the game that Man O'War should have been. I think I will be giving it a go.

But before that, I have ordered Warlord's game Project Z, a skirmish wargame in which you fight zombies. I think it's got great potential for, well, zombie-fighting. Besides, I like the idea of modelling the survivors to look like characters from old horror films. It would be cool to make the characters from Dawn of the Dead, especially Peter, who is to zombie slaying what Hamlet is to knowing people called Yorick.