Spurs: A Tale in the Old West Review

The image of a gruff rider silhouetted against the falling sun is a portrait that persists in the American psyche. It’s an ideal and aspiration that symbolizes manifest destiny and the spirit of the Old West. We’ve all held a phantom six-shooter in our mitt and thrown down with fan-fire like we were at the OK Corral. Hell, I’m a white collared IT professional that still has a portion of my brain devoted to Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah. Mr. B Games has fired a slug into the soft pink tissue inside my skull and managed to mostly connect with an inner vision waiting to be unleashed.

The classic western is fertile ground waiting to be mined in the hobby games industry. It doesn’t have the commercial appeal of Fantasy or Sci-Fi but it speaks to the lawless, primal nature within many of us. The vast majority of titles that have attempted to tackle this setting have done so by featuring cinematic instances of gun fights and explosive conflict. Spurs is the first game to reach beyond and stab right into the heart of the adventure genre, offering a plethora of options for players to explore.

Taking up one of several archetypical western characters you’ll ride along dusty trails, scale treacherous mountains and delve into dark forests. Have an itch for precious metals? You can pick up a pan in the badlands and pan for gold. Hate for a group of bandits that destroyed your childhood by slaughtering your family swelling up? Take to the high road and grasp vengeance by the horns as you put buckshot into those outlaws. You can even rustle up cattle or break wild horses until your hands bleed.

Mechanically there is a clever use of several mini-games that give a pretty distinct feel to each of the avenues towards Wild West fame. The central resolution system relies on each player manipulating a bag of cardboard bullets of various color. To slay a desperado or even gun down another player in a shootout you need to draw bullets out of your bag and score hits, which may be different for each task. Most shootouts rely on grey pistol slugs, while hunting will often use brown rifle rounds. Black bullets mean failure and white, which are acquired through play, auto-succeed regardless of color requirement.

There’s a bag building element at work reminiscent of Hyperborea or Orleans where you are able to manipulate your odds by nabbing weapon upgrades and additional training. It’s certainly random yet it gives a degreee of control by allowing the re-jiggering of your bag. It all has a delicious tactile quality that gallops perfectly in stride with the overarching thematic structure.

The more mundane tasks such as rounding up cattle requires you to pause play momentarily and move to a small hex mini board. You roll directional dice and are forced to move the pungent beasts around while attempting to group them in clusters. The process is again random, but a degree of control is felt as a portion of characters are able to roll in larger quantities and choose the best result. The whims of fate never feel too malicious and the entire process is over within a couple minutes, inflicting only a few moments of downtime on the rest of the group.

Breaking wild colts is a similar process where you’re utilizing the custom engraved dice to avoid obstacles and keep your stallion on the playing field. The most remarkable element of these minute slices of gameplay is that through a collection of dice and a couple terrain hexes Spurs is able to evoke a natural feel of fighting against a beast to maintain dominance. Evocative and engaging, the choice for these unique systems is clever and always enjoyable.

Darting across the countryside hunting turkeys and saddling horses is all focused towards the ultimate goal of acquiring fame faster than the scum sitting to your left and right. Standard play features a race to a tailored point limit reminiscent of the fantastic Merchants and Marauders. It works as a sprint to experience and conquer the encounters in a timely fashion, kicking you in the tail and keeping you on pace. That balance of freedom and drive is handled carefully and never encroaches on that required sense of fun.

All of these sub-systems are clean, interwoven and flow into one another nicely. Despite this, the game can become slightly repetitive over time as one experiences each of the processes that possess limited mechanical variety. The two main punches of surprise and tension come in the form of the exceptional duels and interesting saloon cards. Player versus player dueling consists of both participants quickly drawing bullets from their bag and flipping them face up on the table until they draw hits for their chosen weapon. This element of speed jacks up the intensity to a desirable level and really gets your passion flowing.

Visiting the saloon isn’t as hot-blooded, but it does allow for discovery and pushing forth into the unknown. Flipping those small event cards results in a wide array of whacky challenges and story elements that absolutely stick into the forefront of my conscious. You can run into a lawman who will try to collect the bounty on your head or maybe participant in a shooting contest with a bunch of drunks. These little punches of narrative help round out and define the more expanded story taking place across the stretch of the game. They’re ultimately little highlights of brilliance on this long and dusty road.

Spurs primarily seems to form the solid foundation for a great western system. It’s a design that will ultimately be judged over time by its forthcoming expansion material. Content discovery is a rather large element of adventure games and the inclusion of additional dynamic encounters with new types of challenges packed to the brim with narrative will go a long way towards spicing up the experience, which admittedly does tail off with that quality of repetition over time.

This is an enjoyable and solid design awaiting its defining moment. It accomplishes its goal and delivers on its promise, providing the definitive adventure western when compared to its peers. There’s an air of excitement surrounding the game and its future can’t come quick enough. With a bit more attention and care, this could come to rival some of its adventure peers beyond the genre boundaries. For now, it’s merely the best western design since the Avalon Hill classic Gunslinger.