Designer Diary: Revolver: Ambush on Gunshot Trail & Hunt the Man Down, or Choosin' a way to die? What's the difference? Choosin' a way to live

Greetings to ya, once again. Two expansions for Revolver have rode into view over the rugged boardgaming prairie. Pull up a pew, grab a glass of Firewater, and listen to the ramblings of an old cowpoke.

Welcome to my designer "diary" for the Revolver expansions Revolver: Ambush on Gunshot Trail and Revolver: Hunt the Man Down. Exciting stuff, eh? Only if you're excited by the chaotic chatterings of a nerdy man, who drinks too much "Who-hit-John", ~~forced by current convention~~ pleased to share his thoughts on game design.

Let's start with an icebreaker.

Two cowboys come upon an Indian lying on his stomach with his ear to the ground.

One of the cowboys stops and says to the other, "You see that Indian?"

"Yeah," says the other cowboy.

"Look," says the first one, "he's listening to the ground. He can hear things for miles in any direction."

Just then the Indian looks up. "Covered wagon," he says, "about two miles away. Have two horses, one brown, one white. Man, woman, child, and household effects in wagon."

"Incredible!" says the cowboy to his friend. "This Indian knows how far away they are, how many horses, what color they are, who is in the wagon, and what is in the wagon. Amazing!"

The Indian looks up and says, "Ran over me about a half hour ago."

If you like Pina Coladas, or getting caught in the rain, or Wild West card games, then read on. It may be raining while you're reading this, and you may very well have a long cool drink at your elbow, but you'll definitely get to learn a little about the upcoming trilogy of expansions for my Revolver game.

This "diary" primarily covers my thoughts on expansions #1.1 and #1.2. Notes on the third will come later – after Spiel 2012, certainly – but I will touch upon #1.3 within the body of this piece, and beyond.

Each of these new-fangled expansions contains thirty cards, a six-token punchboard, and a rules sheet splainin' the kerjiggers. In each pack, you will discover two "modules" for your enjoyment. One of the modules is cards for each player to draft into their deck between matches, changing the composition of their deck to suit their individual play styles, to mix things up, and to increase the replayability of the main Revolver game. Ya'll know about deck-building these days, methinks. You swap cards from your expansion pool of cards with your basic deck on a one-for-one basis – pretty much as you see fit. You can change as many cards as you like, depending on how many expansions you have. You might also like to make a gentleman's agreement between duels to swap only four cards this time, and so forth. I leave the specifics of that up to you. Whatever takes your fancy. If you have a hankerin' for Pinkertons, swap some of these lawmen into your McReady deck. If you think Colty might have need of a Stagecoach, swap the bleeder in.

The expansion packs are just that, expanding the Revolver product. The cards aren't collectable. There are no super-rare "Volcanic Pistols" tucked in a random packet. We do have shiny foil cards though. Not really – just joshin' with you – no foils!

Some of these new cards have additional icons, unfamiliar to you now, but you are all quick learners, I hear, so these will be no problem for ya. Hopefully you like making interesting decisions whilst playing my Old West game. If you do, then these will aid your enjoyment. That's a promise.

There's a Gunsight icon, for instance, and this makes the card it adorns a bullet-magnet. A lawman card featuring one of these ain't gonna live too long hereabouts, but he might very well draw the fire away from a card you do care about.

We also have a Mexican Border token icon – typically the McReady cards featuring these have a dramatic impact on the game. You will have to scratch your head for a second before deciding whether it's worth playing a powerful bounty hunter who additionally removes a token or two from the Mexican Border when it hits the table. Just how much do you need this gunfighter? Enough to put Jack Colty a few extra horse-lengths closer to Meh-he-co? You decide. This is the type of thinking you might have to process during an expanded game of Revolver. The Mexican Border is soon to be a hotbed of token activity...

For sure, this new mechanism isn't a patch for the Internet folks who seem to think that the Mexican Border Colty victory condition is a near-impossible path to victory. Not so – it was always designed to be very difficult. It is more a deliberate punishment for poor play by Colonel McReady than a reward for good play by the "Crow". Without it, players would stockpile cards and the game would stagnate, so there's that.

With the expansion cards, the victory conditions are seemingly closer within reach, the screws tightened, the tension ratcheted. I mean, everyone loves new cards, right? I do.

Another new icon is the Padlock. Cards bearing padlocks are used normally, as you would possibly expect, but have an additional bluffing aspect to them when played at the new San Manzanillo Prison battlefield.

I always knew, from the very beginning, that one expansion just *had* to feature a jailbreak in some fashion or another. I wanted the Colty player to be able to increase the size of her murderous crew during the course of the game – not a definite thing that happened every time you played, but a definite possibility; something that could be planned ahead for; something for folks who like hand management games to think about between gunfights at the battlefields.

This battlefield is unique in that you do not play cards or interact with your opponent in the ways that you're used to. It's a special place built to hold the most dangerous men in Texas – and Jack Colty wants to spring a desperado out of there whilst still being mercilessly hunted down by Ned McReady!

The Colty player makes the final decision regarding the jailbreak; it is not a certain thing that he'll try to free "Santiago". One game you may choose to do so, another game you may not. Just don't come crying to me when your plan fails, and a firefight breaks out, killing some of your crew. The McReady player will always be ready to thwart your ambitions.

If and when Jack Colty frees his unsavoury "friend", the bandit player gets a new member to add to his gang. He's a mean son-of-a-gun, and no mistake. There's good reason for Ned to want Santiago to grace Sad Hill Cemetery with his presence.

McReady gets a new victory condition in Hunt the Man Down: killing Jack Colty directly. By the placement of wound tokens, Colty gets closer to death. Five wounds and he's a dead man. Game over, man! These wounds are not just featured on cards played by the law-keeping player; many are also on Colty's own cards. Think of Colty's wounds as a game commodity, a spot of brinkmanship. Does "The Crow" use members of a revolutionary movement to aid him in a tricky spot at Whiskey Canyon? If he does, and then bad things go down, his own card may very well give him a wound. The flip side of that is that Colty may use the expertise of a Lakota medicine man to heal a wound – if he has the card...

I designed each expansion, cramming in all the cool stuff I could, that I would want to see if I were a paying customer at the till (virtual or otherwise), eager to see what's in The Little Wild West Box of Dreams. (That's not an expansion name, by the way – yet.) Each card had to display the theme injection that I myself crave if I were to blind purchase these products, and each also should have a decision bolted onto the card that would both excite me AND increase the replayability of the main game. All of that's pretty obvious.

Basically, my "mission statement" included making each expansion different – have a feature, a unique selling point, rather than the usual ol' thirty new cards, each a small variation on what has gone before and everyone has seen a gazillion times before now. And then some. So as you will see when you purchase Ambush on Gunshot Trail, and Hunt the Man Down, each also has a module that shakes the game up in a groovy manner. You don't have to use these "modules"; you could just use the packs for drafting purposes, and I'm cool with that.

You folks also shouldn't think that each expansion is a one-shot wonder, using icons and shiny things to amuse, which are then dropped in the next expansion. Not so. All of the game items I have chatted about are featured in all subsequent expansions to greater or lesser degrees. Some, like the "Colty wound" mechanism touched upon here, are fleshed out in a most desirous style by Where the River Bends.

Now here's a list, not comprehensive by any means, in no particular order, which covers the films that influenced me the greatest in the creation of the Revolver game and its expansions. Most contain elements that I cooked up in a skillet to produce the cards you'll see soon enough, while some just had an interesting vibe (the list's a hot mess):

-----1. For a Few Dollars More
-----2. True Grit (2010)
-----3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
-----4. The Magnificent Seven
-----5. The Wild Bunch
-----6. The Shadow of Chikara
-----7. The Missing
-----8. A Fistful of Dollars
-----9. Open Range
-----10. A Man Called Horse
-----11. Little Big Man
-----12. Chato's Land
-----13. The White Buffalo
-----14. Maverick (1994)
-----15. 310 to Yuma
-----16. Young Guns II
-----17. The Searchers
-----18. The Ballad of Cable Hogue
-----19. Two Mules for Sister Sara
-----20. Unforgiven
-----21. The Outlaw Josey Wales
-----22. The Naked Spur
-----23. Once Upon a Time in the West
-----24. There Will be Blood
-----25. A Fistful of Dollars
-----26. Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman

Just kidding about Dr Quinn!

In the comments section below, someone might well shout indignantly, "How could you forget to include High Noon, for pity's sake?!" Well, just to annoy YOU.

Make of the list what you will. I include it because it's the type of thing I'd like to read in other designer's notes. Films are important to me. I've seen a lot. Westerns have a special place in my brain because I watched so many of them during my youth. I still view a lot of them nowadays.

[Leans against ranch fencepost] See, when I was a lad, there were very few high-octane action films – the type of thing young lads lap up these days, generally featuring Megan Fox, or her lookalikes, it seems. The action films of my youth were Westerns: high drama, voluptuous scenery, tense gunfights, women who cuss, shifty eyes – they had the whole shebang. Some even had vengeful spirits, and others even had murderous buffalo.

A friend of mine noted recently, "What they do now, for the 15-minute finale of a movie, is fill it with CGI. In For a Few Dollars More, it's 15 minutes of close-ups of eyes and hands, the musical locket, and wide-shots of the Mexican standoff." He was generally correct. Many Westerns are very tense affairs. I LOVE For a Few Dollars More; it is an unforgettable masterpiece of cinema. See how many references to that film you can spot in the expansions after you've bought them, then rush back here to tell me at the bottom of the thread. I may gift you a dollar coin. Or maybe a Geekgold coin. We'll have to wait and see.

"Your game has a lot of similar cards – Bounty Hunter springs to mind – why is that?" asked one very nice chap who purchased my game and liked it.

Now I'm almost certain that folks who buy Knizia's Ivanhoe or Flea Circus, or any theme-lite card game never ask such a question of the game. "Excuse me, Herr Doktor, why has Ivanhoe got so many number '1' cards in the box?" This doesn't happen. Never gonna happen.

The more theme you spoon over a game, the more gamers scrutinize the architecture of the game, I find. The point that is nearly lost here is that the game got published "only" because of its very makeup you see before you in the red tin – if you've bought my game, that is. If my design had featured 150 unique cards, all requiring art, I'm sure White Goblin Games or any one of the four other publishers who approached me to purchase the design would not have bought it. Art, and good art, costs. I happen to think that Chechu Nieto (Revolver's artist and graphic wizard) is very good at what he does, but I would say that. He's worked exclusively on all the Revolver products, giving them a unique signature and an excellent clean design. Tripling the number of unique cards might have landed the game with an inferior artist or sent the project to the scrapheap. That is why the basic game has repeated cards.

What is the point of all this rambling? I'm getting to that! Unintentionally, my game was ripe for expansion, and I seriously mean that. Not the thing about expansion – the thing about "unintentionally". I'm not blowing smoke up yer ass. White Goblin Games didn't ask me to expand the game or even suggest it. (They may have been thinking it.) That was my idea, a little way down the road from the game's manufacture.
I wrote them a proposal, with no card specifics, about making a single thirty-card expansion for Revolver. To my surprise, they responded in the positive. Lovely.

The terrific thing about WGG – other than that terrific thing they did of sending me money for a card game design, and then crafting a world-class-looking product with my name on EVERY CARD AND TIN, and then sending me more money after selling the red tins with my game in them. Other than that terrific thing, WGG is a hands-off company. I don't feel too man-handled. The big bugs don't want the names of the cards changed. They don't want specific XYZ cards included in the game – maybe one or two, tops. This is good. I like an open range in which to ride my game ideas about. Yee-haw!

I also like being the sole guardian of game names in the Revolver universe. Anyone approaches with a name suggestion, and I warily shut my visor and level my spontoon.

Some of the upcoming stuff is pretty different from what some other game publishers spin out. I know of no other game in existence that explores the narrative of the game and the personality of the game characters in the way that we do. Some is fairly subtle ("Civil War Flashbacks") and others not so much ("She's carryin' yer grandchild!" and "The Baldwin Sisters"). I didn't want the new cards to be just new guns – none of them are, actually.

Additionally, a clutch of the new cards bring to players a teeny bit of extra Old West knowledge – there's learnin' afoot! Not everybody has read about Pinkertons, Cherokee Freedman, and the like. One of my dearest wishes – other than you enjoying the game tremendously while it portrays a fun narrative for after-game post mortems – is that you learn a smidgeon more about frontier history than you knew before you played the game.

The cards that eventually made the cut and are included for you to play are primarily the ones that amuse me the most. Sure, some cards get trashed; others thrown into the plastic treasure chest of ideas that don't quite make it right now. (I really do have this chest, honest.) Too expensive, too vague, too complicated. Sometimes the idea of a card is so awesome that you just have to find a way to make it work. Some of my friends disagree.

For example, there's one upcoming card in Revolver: Vengeance on the Frontier that does something no other card in the game does. It also illustrates my point. R#1.3? Yes, I'm digressing. It's my diary, you dawgs, I'll splatter out what I want, you hear! Back to the card: it has a cool ability, and it enhances the theme when you play the card. The game's narrative grows when this card hits the table. It required a "teeny" bit more text than most cards in the game to pull off. During playtesting, the card's text grew whenever a weird situation occurred – so that the card could cleanly vault the FAQ QUAGMIRE (sticky situations). Or as Leigh Caple calls them: "Jackie Peters cards" – named after a screaming girl from the adorable trashy movie Jaws II. ("Lens my ass!") When you design some cards, they automatically go on the watch list because you know in advance, even at the moment of "birth" that some cards are either semi-broken, or confusing, or both – or just special.

Now, back to the diary: Eventually one playtester suggested a superior way for the problem card to work that required half the text and did the same thing in game-mechanism terms. Now, pay attention, this is important: The card, when played with the v2 "clean" edit, didn't feel even half as awesome as it did before when you played it. Did the same damn thing, just in a different way. Yes, I changed the card back. When you play this card, you'll see why I did it. And, if you're anything like me, you'll want this card to appear in every damn game – not because it's a powerful card, but because it is such a cool thing for the game to do.

What card is this? you ask. "You double-crossing snake!" is the answer. What does it do? You'll have to buy the expansions to find out.

I very nearly forgot to mention the Ambush cards! My memory these days. Yeah, so these are a new subgroup of McReady cards that are laid out before the game begins, a type of hidden unit deployment. You won't have the same ambush cards for each game as one is always removed before play. They allow that dirty dog of a lawman, McReady, to better plan his strategy for the manhunt. You get a set of these cards in Ambush on Gunshot Trail, and they are built upon in each subsequent expansion in ways that you might not expect.

Playtesters found that players started getting into a whole meta-game experience with the placement of these cards. If the McReady player has placed a nasty Apache ambush at the Bank at Repentance Springs two games on the trot, will she do so on the third game? She may, but then again...

When asked, some respondents said that they'd like to see cards which make some of the existing cards from the main game more relevant rather than redundant as each new expansion hits. This is a good point. I'd like to talk about it here, if you don't mind. This is the place to do it, after all: my designer notes, and all that.

Some expanded miniature games and CCGs suffer from "power creep" – whereby new uber-cool gear is added to the game, and you must, at all damn costs, keep up or die. This new stuff is just *better* than the old stuff. Sometimes this stuff is popped in by business-minded game manufacturers to increase sales. Those weasels!

There's no question that some of the cards presented in the expansions are superior to some of the original game cards in certain situations. But guess what? This isn't a collectable game. When you play Revolver with your girlfriend, you'll both have access to the same pool of expansion cards. This is the keystone of my point. It doesn't matter as long as the sides are still balanced (which they are), and all the cards have an internal consistency (which they do). You guys will be the ones deciding which cards to use on your game evening from the expansions you bought. The size of one player's wallet won't be a factor here.

Anyhow, all that said, some of the expansion cards upcoming heavily reference the "basic" cards – so all what I said above, about more powerful cards, won't amount to a hill of beans if you draft in "Fan the gun" or "Trixie and Delilah – Saloon Shakes" and manage to draw a few "38 Specials". Watch out, McReady, for those deadly gals!

I genuinely hope that somebody reading this has found it useful – as they take an age to write – and feels the hot flush of desire for the first two Revolver expansions, and decides that they must buy and try them: Ambush on Gunshot Trail and Hunt the Man Down.

Yes, each is *only* a pack of thirty cards, but a massive amount of effort and passion went into the making of these little packs, all of it with the dead-eye aim of increasing the fun YOU have when playing Revolver. They weren't made with a lick and a promise.

So, as I climb back into the saddle of my mustang in my best bib and tucker, put on my hat, ready to skedaddle over the horizon, I'll leave you with another joke:

A cowboy was admiring an Indian's necklace. "What is it made of?" he asked.

"Alligator's teeth," the Indian replied.

"I suppose," he said patronizingly, "that they mean as much to you, as pearls do to us."

"Oh, no," the Indian objected. "Anybody can open an oyster."

Mark Chaplin