Cowboy games in 18mm – a new project

I have always wanted to do cowboys games but these can be a pain as you need lots of terrain to do them well. Whats a cowboy game without a wild west town after all! In fact a wild west table is more about the terrain than the figs. So a few years ago picked up the blue moon 18mm cowboys and Game craft buildings.   The idea was to create a nice set which would allow me to play such games but not have to lug massive amount of terrain around. Oh and yes, I do have plans for 28mm games (and have some figs for a gang or two in the lead mountain) but that’s not wonderfully practical for storage and taking to gaming at the local gaming store. The 18mm scale is much more effective for transport for games and also easier on the wallet as well as painting time.

So, this is the first post showing what I am doing around this. I have the toys so might as well paint them and get them played with after all. This is first few buildings and my first gang to show off. These are a long coat wearing group – very much styled on Stockburn’s and his men from the Pale Rider movie. They are not exactly the same but that’s the idea here anyway. So here you can see the gang – both front and back. With 18mm figs I wanted to ensure that each gang was easily to identify, so each of them will have very specific colour sets. These guys have the light coats and brown pants. These guys can work well in various Wild West games and to my mind came out nicely. Part of this though is creating a Wild west town for the game to be played in. Here you can see the first 3 buildings of my 15mm town. A town is required as although some games can be done in a rural setting the classic gunfights are around towns if not in them. I put these together but did not add the covered walkways on the buildings, as these are for gaming not display. The covered walkways are great but in this scale would be a pain to use and too fiddly in play. I also put a solid base on the buildings to make them more structurally sound to survive the trip to shops and back. This had an added bonus of raising them up a bit so they work better with the miniatures, and reflects the nature of the ground floor being off the road level in most western towns. These buildings come unpainted so as well as putting them together I had to paint them. This turned out quite nice in the end and is not as bad as I thought it would be. So there we are, the first of a my posts for this project. You’ll see more in the coming weeks. It’s not 28mm and so does not have that same massive table display look, but it will allow me to host some fun quick cowboy games.  This is especially as I don’t expect this to be a weekly game but something we play once in a while.