It feels like it has been ages since I have written a
review. The last one was what…. Chosen Men? Pikeman’sLament? Pulp Alley? I honestly can
not recall. Instead my attention has
been focused on other goals. You may
recall that the summer is a pretty busy time for me professionally so getting the time to read and write this
review was a treat.
That brings us to today’s offering. I am not 100% sure, but I think this game has
been around longer than Osprey would
have you believe. I find reference to a purchasable
PDF version in the past also called Mad
Dogs With Guns about the same period and genre. It may have even been released in a Soldiers
and Strategy magazine. However, I have
not been diligent enough to confirm this.
Osprey seems
to have used a similar pattern with HorizonWars. First, it was a successful
self-published set of PDFs before being picked up/licensed to Osprey to
publish. If this is true, it is a shrewd
move by Osprey and could give those aspiring game designers out there a solid
avenue to expand. I hope that is there
model.
Mad Dogs With Guns
is a campaign skirmish game focused around gangsters in the 20’s. This has been an interesting period to me for
gaming even though I have few miniature or models for it. It appeals due to a small number of models,
campaign potential, and the “Rule of Cool”.
In addition, gangster activity was typically not in the city but in
rural parts of the US so any terrain will do including desert canyons, forests,
or even river mouths/beaches. However,
there is something appealing about the city boards used for gangster games. When it comes to Gangster games you are
looking for colorful characters, bullets everywhere, corruption, tommy guns,
cars, and dolls.
Does Mad Dog With
Guns deliver the goods?
Things I like
As always, I start with the things I liked in the game
and build my review from there. Mad Dogs With Guns follows a similar
ethos as Frostgrave. The actual mechanics are simple and easy to
perform on the table, but the meat of the game is in the Campaign. That is where Mad Dogs With Guns can stand above other wargames. It is loaded with period flavor and
concepts. There are rules for Italian,
Irish, Tongs, etc. There are city
officials to bribe, when cops will get involved, and even the Feds. It even has a made-up campaign city in
Illinois to use as your template that sounds suspiciously like Chicago. The feel for these campaigns is about
right.
When it comes to gang creation, it is surprisingly loose. You can get your gang “off the Rack” with no
upgrades/changes for a quick 1-off, randomly roll each gangster up for unique
abilities and personalities, or get them “Off the Rack” and purchase upgrades
or personality rolls. All the methods
are valid, but allow the players to decided how “custom” they want each gang to
be. For a 1-off throw down “Off the Rack”
will work. For a club campaign then Upgrades
will allow quick and unique gangs, while for a full narrative experience you
can roll up each model.
The Mechanics themselves are simple and straight
forward. There is minimal tracking and
not much in the way of “If This/ThenThat” rules. Each gangster has basic
stats for the 4Ms. You consistently try to roll below your stat
for success, the higher the stat the better you are. More powerful weapons roll more damage dice
and reduce your gangsters hits, which degrades their ability to fight all the
way from small injury to dead. In
practice hand-to-hand weapons are less lethal than shooting weapons. This makes sense since Sean Connery always
taught us to never bring a knife to a gunfight.
There are also rules for doing narrative actions like
negotiate, taunt, give a deadly stare, etc.
This allows a light RPG experience that is important in these small
scale skirmish games. Fighting and
shooting may not always be the best way to get the job done.
Things I Do Not Like
The game uses a card draw activation mechanic. Each gang member gets a card in the pile, and
when a gang’s card comes up they can either act or hold. Hold allows you to interrupt later in the
turn if you wish. Some cards allow
multiple gangsters to act. The advantage
of this is that it randomizes action so you never know exactly what you will
get to do, and forces you to improvise according to the fog of war. This is all good. My quibble is more around adding extra “stuff”
to play the game beyond the dice and outside of the game’s core mechanics. Make no mistake, it is a minor quibble. A simple alternate activation would have
worked or alternate activation by type so all gangsters would go before thugs,
etc.
Throwing dynamite and grenades uses a “flick”
mechanic. I have nothing against “flick”
mechanics, I have used them myself in TotalCARnage. However, this one goes
against the flavor of the rest of the game and simply seems like a bolted on
bit of silliness. Instead, a simple dice
mechanic would have been preferred. The
game includes one as an alternative and should have stuck with that one. The “Flick” again adds more “stuff” to the
game outside of what it needs.
Injury and Injury results can be a bit too table heavy
for me. About half of all “hits” will
either be avoided or force a fallback instead of shooting. That may make sense since gangsters are not
that good of shots. I mean even and
artist with a Tommy Gun is still spraying shots everywhere. I also do not mind a “defense” roll used to
negate a hit. After all, no one wants to
stand there and simply remove figures.
However, I do not enjoy cross-referencing tables to find out if I hit
the deck, stumbled back, lost a minor hit, etc.
This is also intended to be a club game. It is not “tight”. In fact, it is rather loose. Gameplay and rules are basic and
straightforward. There are not a lot of
in-game bonuses to be manipulated or stacked.
The tactics are simple and straight forward without a lot of depth or
complexity to them. There are not a ton
of tough decisions to make based on the mechanics. Instead, they rely on the scenarios. The fun of the game is the story that it
allows you to tell about the game, more than the game play itself.
However, if the fun of the game is the scenarios, these
are also rather loose. The basics for
scenarios are there, but it is not tight regarding the mechanics of setting up
the board, terrain placement, deployment, numbers, etc. Each player is assumed to use common sense,
which is harder than you would think.
The scenarios fit nicely into what we “know” about gangsters thanks to
media, history, movies, etc; but do not always lead to well-balanced or tight
scenarios.
Meh and Other
Uncertainties
The game has cars and all the rules you need for
cars. They seem functional, but not that
compelling to me. There is the basic
stuff you need like speeding up, slowing down, turning, etc. They introduced a lot of tables. However, automobiles felt more fiddly than
fun.
Every gang has a Boss, Gun Moll, and Accountant. I like the inclusion of the accountant in the
rules. It allows for some fun scenarios
of the type we have all seen in the movies and on TV.
The game is in a nice hardcover book. However, it still has a lot of whitespace,
large font, and is spaced out. I think Osprey may have stretched it a bit to
get to a Hardback version, and could have slammed it into a Blue Wargames
Series instead. However, there are some
great images of Copplestone Casting gangster models in action as well as a
couple of nice art pieces too.
Final Thoughts
If you read Mr. Whitehouse’s Design Notes in the back of
the rules I feel he mostly succeeded in what he was trying to accomplish. That makes the game successful. However, some of the mechanics just feel a
bit dated now and the rules themselves simple resolve the 4Ms. The rules are not what drive the game's
fun. The fun comes from the campaigns
and stories that the campaigns lead to.
As a stand-alone 1-off game this would be a bit of a dud,
but as part of a campaign with multiple gangs at club night it would be great! Multiple games could be played in an evening
leading up to a big gangland raid with all the players working together…. at least
at first. The game gives enough of the
guidelines to create a fun campaign experience, and that is the type of gaming
I like.
