Xmas shoot out

The Guildford club has a bit of a tradition (like a lot of clubs I suspect) of staging a Xmas Special in the last meeting before the break.  This has never never involved anything xmassy as far as I know but is usually a large, not very serious, multi-player game.  Over the last few years we've had numerous Cowboy shootouts and one year we had a mass Spanish Civil War tank battle with each player controlling a number of tanks and armoured cars (I know that doesn't sound even vaguely realistic but we were going for a tabletop version of World of Tanks!)

This year we were treated to a seasonal 1920's Gangster shootout instead, courtesy of Mike of Black Hat Miniatures fame.  4 teams of Gangsters all converged on an arriving train to meet/rob/escort one of the passengers.  In typical style the game descended into a bloody mess pretty quickly with hijacked cars crashing into each other and running over the odd pedestrian.

One of my characters (we generally had 2 each on the assumption that they wouldn't last long) discovered some dynamite in a builders yard and failed to blow up any of the opposition but did destroy the train's tender!  Unfortunately a team mate who was also laden with sticks of dynamite was then shot, setting off a chain reaction and devastating the builders yard!  Other highlights included one character getting stuck while trying to exit the car via the shot-out windscreen and spending several turns firmly wedged despite the aforementioned dynamite extravaganza going off next to him, and a character immediately dubbed 'Batman' for his highly successful tactic of ignoring guns and sticking to hitting people with his baseball bat.

At the end of the evening somebody won (not the Italians...we were all dead) and we all had a great game.  The rules used were Howard Whitehouse's excellent 'Mad Dogs with Guns'

And since it's xmas here's an appropriately titled song combining Gangsters with Xmas (and a candidate for the best titled song ever!)...