Wargame Shop: Your Magnificent 7 - Cinematic Western Gunfight Rules

Wargame Shop: A set of cowboy rules that allow you to recreate your favourite classic western movies on a tabletop. Each player becomes a director that casts seven characters into their roles that form a functioning frontier group. These groups are represented by seven popular western categories form the movies, these are the Lawmen Posse, Outlaw Gangs, Hired Hands, Gunfighter Band, Cowboy Ranch Family, U.S Cavalry Squad and lastly the Native War Party. Each frontier group has its own attributes that can be used to distinguish them from the other factions.

Cast experience for characters starts with the fledgling stars, the Greenhorns and progresses through Competent, Practised, Expert and finishes with Renowned movie stars. There is even a chance that characters will progress to become legendary, the megastars of the movie screens. Once the directors have cast the parts for their seven cast members and chosen a leader, then it’s time for Lights, Camera, Action… Does it start with a fast-draw showdown or just a random encounter or do you follow the script from your preferred western movie?

Both directors square-off against each other across the Wild West film set to determine who gains the upper hand by rolling initiative. The winner activates their most experienced cast first, whilst the loser activates their least experience members first. Directors alternate through their cast until all seven characters have performed their actions. When activated a character can expend their allocated actions on moving, shooting or brawling; possible combinations can be selected if characters have enough actions. Actions are all based around our founding gaming principles of action and reaction. What are these you might say? Well for instance, a character raises his revolver to shoot, their target rolls and notices a gun pointing at them, so they react; but do they go prone, dodge to cover or shoot their own gun. If it’s the latter then both characters have a ‘shoot-out’ and the winner fires first, they may fire simultaneously, but the loser will still fire last if they are still alive that is.

Autonomous extras or townsfolk, has we like to call them, can get in your way, run for cover when the shooting starts, seek out the local Town Marshal if they identify characters has a wanted felons or even have a ‘shoot-out’ against them. Directors gain clapperboard tokens as the production unfolds and these can be spent enhancing a character’s action scene, extending their performance with a Director’s Cut. The Director’s Cuts allows either a cinematic action or a cinematography technique to be performed once in their activation. What you’ll need besides these rules are a friendly opponent, seven 25/28mm miniatures that represent your magnificent 7 frontier group, a tabletop with Wild West terrain, an imperial tape measure and two six-sided dice.