Thursday, January 19, 2012

Alcatraz!

I'm fortunate enough to live in the same town as a wargames publisher, Ed Teixeira of Two Hour Wargames, and we get together to play various THW rulesets on a semi-regular basis.  This week, Ed broke out his Alcatraz island, which last saw action at MillenniumCon back in November.
Although Ed ran a zombie game using this game board at MillCon, this time he suggested we play After the Horsemen,  a post-apocalyptic game from THW.
Ed took one character, and I took one main character and one sidekick.  The premise was that once things started to go downhill, but before they totally went to hell, the California government became independent and decided to store gold as some sort of backing for its currency.  The gold (or some of it anyway) ended up on Alcatraz Island, and our characters arrived in search of it.
As we searched building after building, we sometimes encountered natives who weren't too happy to see us.  We used the In Sight process to determine which figures acted first (the better you did, the higher your score--shown by the dice--and the quicker you acted).  THW combat is quick and deadly:  In one gunfight, even though we had the drop on three bad guys, the flunkie failed his test and ran away, leaving the two of us against three enemy.
 Even though we acted first, we still lost Ed's character (replaced by the flunky, who shamefacedly returned once the smoke cleared).  Ed's second character died in a subsequent battle, as we went from building to building searching for the gold, which my character eventually found after shooting at another pair of bad guys, killing one and chasing off the other.
With the gold found, all he needs to do is figure out how to haul it all back to the mainland--with lots of hostiles between him and his boat...

It was a fun game and fantastic scenery.  My thanks to Ed for all the gaming.

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