Fistful of Lead: Horse and Musket at Recruits Part One

Last weekend I helped The Baron launch his new Horse and Musket variant for Fistful of Lead (FfoL) at Recruits in Lee's Summit, Mo. We played 4 games over the weekend using the Fight at the Farmstead scenario from the new rules. Each game had some variation on the theme to take advantage of number of players, and to stretch the rules. There are some special rules included to characterize individuals, but for our games all figures had common stats.

You can learn a lot more about FfoL on The Baron's site, but here's a quick summary. FfoL is an individual-level skirmish game, originally designed for "Hollywood-esque" Wild West games, using playing cards - some with special actions - for character activation and D10's for resolving actions. Characters can be Pinned, Wounded or Killed based on a D10 roll and a couple of modifiers, as they attempt to reach goals set out by the scenario chosen.

Horse and Musket makes three key changes to the original rules. First, since black powder weapons were slow to reload, there is now a separate "reload" action. This makes deciding when to shoot, at what range, an important new aspect of tactics. Second, because the volume of fire is different in the black powder era, Pinned has been replaced with Shaken, which like Pinned, limits the figures' actions, but does not cause them to go to ground. Third, Hand-to-Hand combat does not now include short-range shooting, but there is a provision for shooting at a charging opponent prior to the actual hand-to-hand fighting, IF the charged figure has a loaded musket. Mighty big IF.

We played on a 5-foot square table. View from the British side:

And from the French and Indian side:

The scenario features two farmers, Molly and Johann, who become the targets of an Indian raid. The Indians are bent on killing or capturing the farmers. The Indians are unaware that a group of Rangers are visiting the farmers while on a routine scout and will aid the defense of the farm.

Game One on Friday night: four Rangers are in the two buildings with the two farmers when 2 groups of five Indians attack.

The Indians weathered a hail of poorly-aimed shooting (lots of bad dice rolls) to eventually kill the Rangers and Johann in hand-to-hand assaults on the farm buildings and take Molly hostage.

Game One to the Indians!


More coming in Part Two.