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Ranchers vs Dinosaurs

So this is a nice fun game about cattle and sheep ranching. At the start, both herds are just milling about randomly. We will use the "push" close combat rules from QILS to have a rancher move an animal in a deliberate direction. Then roll a die to get the nearest X animals to go along with the one being directed.

You can go on foot, or mount up on one of the available horses. Just drive your herd over the river and off the board.

Past the dinosaurs.

Say what?

Sparse, but interesting terrain makes coordinated movement a bit challenging and slow. Especially since the dinos can outmanuever the herds. But not the horses.

Fortunately, dinos are close combat only. You can expect to lose some livestock. But the dinos have to decide how much effort to put into dining, and how much to keep those pesky gnats with guns from taking shots at you.

Likewise, the ranchers have to balance moving the herds, and dealing directly with the dinos. As well as just shooting them, we added an "extension" of the push rules to allow ranchers to use ranged combat attacks to "scare" dinosaurs backwards. Just using the push rules with ranged combat vice close combat. So a scare is much more likely to be successful, but it has a less finite attack.

At the end of the game, neither side killed off either opponent. Both sides did do some damage. The ranchers escaped with all four players, but only four horses. Both dinos got lunch, and won by eating more livestock than was able to be driven off the far side of the board.