Shooting irons

It's pretty much impossible to name a favourite game, any more than a favourite book or movie, but Richard Hamblen's Gunslinger (Avalon Hill, 1982) has got to be up there in the top five for me and Nick. Every game of Gunslinger creates a gripping story. The time Andy Murdin and I faced each other twenty feet apart across a saloon table, six-guns in hand, and Andy fired off shot after shot, missing every time, while I coolly built up Aim points and then ended the showdown with a single bullet. The time Nick left a stick of dynamite lit in the stables, and the game had gone into hunting mode, and Steve Foster stuck his head inside the stables just as the fuse ran out -- and his head leaded in the middle of the street at my feet.

If "Misfire! Kill the son of a bitch!" means anything to you, know that that entire scene is exactly how an exchange of gunfire could play out using these rules.

You won't play it, though. It's a 36-page rulebook and -- well, I know you'll read it, you're a proper gamer, but in 2026 you won't be able to find half a dozen friends who can hold those rules in their head. Hey, these days one in seven US college students doesn't even have the literacy and numeracy skills of an average ten-year-old. People can't cope with games like this anymore. It's a shame, but on the other hand we now have games consoles and PCs that handle the rules for us. We can't recite 10,000-line poems from memory anymore either. The world turns.

So it's probably a bit pointless to suggest a fix to the Gunslinger rules forty-four years on but, great as the firearms and hunting rules were, hand to hand combat never cut it. In a nutshell, the game works in turns of two seconds each, subdivided into five segments. Each turn players select a series of action cards, each action having an action point cost, and they simultaneously reveal their top cards. A 1-point action takes place in segment 1, then if your next card was a 2-pointer you get to do that action in segment 3, and so on. Some effects add delays, and any action delayed beyond segment 5 is lost. We then start a new turn.

As you can see, the cards vary. Just in that batch there's a 1-point Advance and a 2-point. When you reveal a Cock/Aim/Shoot you don't have to announce which of those actions you're taking till the segment comes up. Placing Aim on someone is usually a good idea (handguns are notoriously inaccurate) but when someone else is pointing a loaded gun at you that takes nerve.

It works great for gunfights. Trust me on that. Where the rules fall down is on hand to hand. There are various attacks (Bear Hung, Jab, Belt, etc) and various defences (Duck, Guard, Block) and you have to hope you've picked a defence when the other guy went for an attack, and that the defence you chose counters that specific attack.

Nick and I propose a different way of handling it. Hand to hand cards would either involve attack actions or the ability to add or remove tactical advantage. Tactical advantage is about manoeuvring to get the upper hand. It's the analogue of Aim in firearms combat. The difference is that you can't reduce somebody else's Aim on you, other than by moving out of their field of view, but in the case of tactical advantage you'd have the option to reduce any points that the opponent has placed on you. A punch will be more likely to land when backed up by plenty of tactical advantage points. The actual damage of the attack will pretty much track with action point cost -- so a Jab is usually 1 action point, a Haymaker is 5 action points. The latter is more likely to settle the matter if it lands -- but that depends on how much tactical advantage you've built up on the target.

As I said, it's more than a little pointless to try and fix it now. And Mr Hamblen may well have come up with a more elegant solution of his own, having had nearly half a century to think about it. If you can find the game anywhere, we still highly recommend it, but unless your friends are hardcore gamers you might need to feed the rules into Gemini Notebook and get it to summarize how to play.