Scott Tepper:  Cowboys and…Fishes?

As I’m preparing to go to Columbus to demo the new releases for Rio Grande Games at Origins, I spent most of my week reviewing and practicing teaching Zooloretto, If Wishes Were Fishes, Notre Dame, Die Baumeister Von Arkadia, Guatemala Cafe, Vikings, and Yspahan.  If Wishes Were Fishes was new to me, so it took me a few teachings to get into an easy pattern of explanation.  It’s not a difficult game by any means, but I did notice that a couple of people (non-gamers) were having a hard time with wanting to do more on their turn than the rules would allow.  Luckily, this is the sort of thing that I want to happen and address before I’m demoing at a convention.

The more experienced gamers I taught IWWF to picked the game up quickly, as the basic mechanism is relatively easy.  The game comes with a deck of cards that have both a fish and a “wish” printed on them.  On your turn, you can do one of three things: 1) You can take a fish from one of the four face-up fish cards and put it into one of your two boats, or 2) You can take one of the face-up fish cards and use the “wish” that’s displayed on the card, discarding the card in the process, or 3) You may sell one of the fishes you have in one of your boats to the matching fish stall on the gameboard.  The price you receive for selling your fish is $2 plus a bonus if one of the different meeple-shaped buyers is standing at that particular stall.

The fish cards that the players take are in order from the “shallowest” to the “deepest”.  If on your turn you take a fish and it is not in the “shallowest” end, you must put a rubber worm on each card you pass over.  A new card is turned over and becomes the new “deepest” fish whenever a card is taken so that every player always has four cards to choose from.  In this way, it is possible that a card may end up with one or more worms on it. 

When you sell a fish, you put one of your colored fish markers on the stall, and if enough fish are present (at first four, then five, etc...) then bonuses are paid to the players that have the most and second-most fish at the stall.  If future fish are sold to that stall, the player still receives the normal payout, but the fish is sent to the garbage heap.

The game ends in one of two ways.  The first way happens when the 4th market is full (meaning it has seven fish on it).  The player with the most worms in his possession receives $8, and the player with the second-most receives $4.  The player with the most money wins.  The second way the game could end occurs when the 10th fish is placed on the garbage heap.  When this happens, the players with the most and second-most fish on the heap LOSE money equal to the current market rate.  The bonuses for worms is paid out as in the other game-ending scenario, and the player with the most money wins.

The crux of the game is the challenge of deciding whether to take fish and put them in your boat to use as fish in the future, or to use the fish immediately as a wish.  The wishes are rather straightforward, such as: moving a buyer and selling fish, or selling fish as if they were fish of another kind.  Some fish wish cards even grant the player an additional boat.  While the decisions aren’t torture inducing, it is important to watch your neighbors and sometimes take a card that doesn’t help you so much just to prevent your opponents from getting it.

The 12 or so people I taught IWWF to all enjoyed it.  The general consensus was that it had more depth and challenging decisions than they expected from what they initially assumed was a simple game.  It’s definitely a good family game that is playable in less than an hour.

The other new game I was able to try out last week was Cowboys: The Way Of The Gun, published by Worthington Games.  Cowboys comes with several different scenarios, a la Heroscape.  I have played only one of them, so I’m not qualified to do a review yet, but I can give you my first impression.

In the scenario we played, one player represented the sheriff, and the others were bank robbers. The bank robbers’ goal was to escape off one end of the playing board (which is comprised of five smaller boards put together).  The sheriff’s objective is to kill the bank robbers until there’s only one left.  The Bad Guys each have some sort of weapon.  On your turn, you can either move your robber up to four spaces, or you can shoot up to two times.  As the player pieces do have a direction to them, you also can, for your turn, rotate your character and shoot once. 

The success of shooting is resolved by comparing a 2-die dice roll with a chart that takes the robber’s weapon and distance to the target into consideration.  The Good Guy player moves his sherrif in the same manner as the bad guys, but also gets to add a townsperson to the board every round.  The townspeople move and shoot just like the other characters—except if they are successfully shot at by the Bad Guys, the townspeople are removed from the game.  Each time the sheriff or the robbers are successfully shot at, their mobility is decreased by one.  If they are shot a total of four times, they are removed from the board.

While the game is rather simple, you really get a good feel for the theme.  The rules for line of sight do a decent job of bringing a realistic feel to the game without bogging it down in minutia.  The Bad Guy players need to work together so that they aren’t removed too quickly from the game, while the Good Guy player needs to be smart about the placement of the townspeople. 

In the game of Cowboys that we played, the Bad Guys just barely squeeked out a win.  All but two of the robbers had been eliminated, and these remaining two in effect limped off the board.  This is one of those types of games where the players yell out load at the good and bad die rolls.  While the luck factor in the game can be controlled to some degree by the placement of the pieces when they attempt to shoot or when they are in the line of fire, as you can probably guess, the results of the game are greatly dependent on the dice rolls.  On the positive side, there is a lot of die rolling, so the results of those rolls should average out statistically.  On the negative side, a few “good” rolls by your opponent can quickly eliminate you from the game.

A nice thing about Cowboys is that it appears to be modifiable.  It comes with special ability cards that allow you to break rules, and the other scenarios I glanced at sounded just as interesting as the one we played.  I’m looking forward to playing this one again.

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