Gun Trail: A Small-Bounty, Big Western Vignette

Marco Salogni’s print-and-play adventure Gun Trail offers a true taste of the Western. As bounty hunter “Scrooge” Masterson, players explore five maze-like maps as they chase the villainous Gatling Gang and engage in high noon shootouts.

Print-and-play component printed on cardstock, cut, and assembled.

The Western genre has typically taken a backseat to fantasy in my imagination. But like any driving situation, sometimes the one in the backseat likes to steer. And right now, Westerns are behind the wheel, flying down the highway. My interest was piqued by my Summer reading pilaster earlier this year: Stephen King’s The Stand. Although not outright a Western, themes and character portraits within the epic fantasy novel align with archetypal Western tropes. I mean, really—isn’t Randall Flagg cool and cruel, dressed in black, like any mid-century depiction of a villainous outlaw? This spurred me to then pick up Cormac McCarthy’s brutal Blood Meridian and Upton Sinclair’s more tame Oil!, after rewatching Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Currently, between spurts of blog-writing, I’m enamored in Peter Cozzen’s new history on the Black Hills mining town of Deadwood.

I’ve also been according more attention to Westerns on the screen. Viewings of new-to-me modern films like Bone Tomahawk and Killers of the Flower Moon have accompanied revisits to some of my favorites reconsidered within the context of their genre: True Grit (the 2010 Coen Brothers remake), Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, and the anthological Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Even a few more hours on Red Dead Redemption 2 reminded me how much the game’s producers nailed the feeling of immersion into an American Western frontier, even if the gameplay becomes monotonous quickly.

So the iron was already hot when I saw Marco Salogni’s Gun Trail in its closing hours on Kickstarter. Although I don’t usually back print-and-play games (for no other reason than I don’t own a printer, and need to subtly commandeer the Xerox at work to print out any PnP bits and bobs) a little Wild West solitaire adventure for the cost of lunch was just right for my current milieu (and worth the embarrassment of potentially getting caught wasting the toner at work). The Kickstarter page teased a dice-rolling, map-combing bounty hunt and featured striking caricatures of lawless scoundrels who will parlay in some high-noon encounters. Gun Trail isn’t Salogni’s first rodeo; he boasts a back catalog of thematically diverse, map-focused adventure mini-games. I reached for my holster, drew, and backed it.

Gun Trail Kickstarter banner.

If Great Western Trail is like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly—behemoth epics, genre-defining within their medium—Gun Trail is like the 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery: a focused episode, a morsel that captures its intended flavor so well that even though it’s over in a snapshot, you’re left satisfied from the intense, albeit brief, ride in the saddle. In Gun Trail, the player takes on the role of Emmett “Scrooge” Masterson, a bounty hunter contracted to find the notorious Gatling Gang in and around the town of Gravelton. Over the course of the adventure, the player searches five unique maps, encounters a handful of lampoonish outlaws, and finds some gear before ultimately confronting the Gatling Gang in a final boss fight.

The puzzle of the game is navigating the maze-like network of trails and paths on each map that lead to junctions and numbered spaces, at which the player may either find a helpful bit of gear or encounter an Outlaw to defeat. Generally, I’ve found there are two extremes when deciding which path to follow in a maze game like this:

1. With intention: Plan out part of—or the entire—route before putting pencil to paper. Optimize it. Strategize it. Make sure you hit all the buffs along the way and work out an exit strategy to get to the symbol that drops you into the next map. This may be the less stressful way to play but doesn’t necessarily leave room for the kinds of faux pas and errors that make a narrative adventure game like this tense and challenging.

2. Leave it to fate: My preferred way to play, just pick a path and go. Hopefully it takes you in the right direction. Throw caution to the wind and let those Hit and Skill Point boons be damned. If you get to where you intend, great; if not, you’re a bounty hunter hot on the trail and don’t have time to think too much about where you should go.

Uncut print-and-play components on cardstock.

I tried playing Gun Trail both ways. The former was methodical, and I reached the climax of the game in good shape, having made no unnecessary diversions, crossed every buff on each map, and never backtracked. With the latter, I never made it out of Gravelton (including the McClusky’s Tavern map) before the Gatling Gang got away because I kept retracing routes I had already taken.

Every time the player encounters an Outlaw at a numbered space, or has to take a route they’ve already traveled, they fill in a notch on the pocket watch marker on the player board. If all ten spaces are filled, the player’s quarry escapes and the game ends in a loss. Retracing paths represents dilly-dallying and wasting valuable time in pursuit of the Gatling Gang. So maybe the best course of action is a little of column A and a little of column B—be patient and think tactically about routes, maybe peek ahead a bit to see where each path ends up, but don’t meticulously plan every step.

Pocket watch tracker that paces the game and tracks how many Outlaws have been defeated.

Reaching a numbered spot on any map for the first time triggers a draw from a deck containing 12 Outlaws and 5 Trinkets. The player can choose to accept or decline any challenge from an Outlaw, keeping in mind they need to defeat at least one on every map and must defeat one in each of the four suits—cigars, whisky, footprints, and bullets—in order to proceed to the final showdown with the Gatling Gang.

Resolving encounters with Outlaws is a simple roll of the dice. Each Outlaw has stats for health and how many rounds of rolling the player has to knock them out. The player has three attacks to choose from—punching, kicking, and shooting—each requiring a higher roll on two dice but dealing more damage accordingly. A lucky roll with the shooting iron can make almost any outlaw bite the dust outright, but there are only six bullets in the chamber to last the whole game. If the player can’t defeat the Outlaw in the rounds specified, the Outlaw scores some hits before the player can choose to run or go in for another bout.

During these encounters, I was never uncertain whether I would beat an Outlaw or not. Mathematically, the odds are usually in the player’s favor if they choose the right type of attacks and have average luck rolling the bones. The player may take some hits—especially against villains like “Babyface” Blanton with 6 health—but every encounter feels winnable; it’s just a matter of how many resources (health and action points) it costs. I like this sort of tension, as it feels—as Spaghetti Westerns should—that the hero’s adventure will have encounters, twists, and turns but won’t end before they get the chance to face off against the notorious baddie. So I may walk into the Gatling Gang hideout battered and bruised from my rendezvous with “Braids” Brewster, but damned if she’ll be the one to put me in my grave.

Encounter with Barber Ian in McClusky's Tavern.

Defeating an Outlaw also notches a mark on a second meter on the timekeeping pocket watch. This one lets the player unlock and use special actions—like rerolling a die or flipping a die 180 degrees—by spending an action point during Outlaw encounters. This can often tip a close showdown in the player’s favor, but be wary of running dry on action points before the Gatling Gang encounter.

Items can also come out of the deck and help overcome enemy encounters. Some boost attack efficiency while others help prevent damage. Find enough of them and they might even work in combination with one another. For instance, once the player has both the Filthy Poncho and the Metal Plate, both Trinkets lose their usual bonuses to instead prevent any damage the player would take—but only once. By the second playthrough, I found myself dreading assembling these item combos (which are mandatory to use once the player has all the items). One reason is that the Gatling Gang is immune to item combos, which thematically feels a little off. Shouldn’t the potent item combo I’ve worked all game to put together be especially useful against the big bad at the end? The combos also consume resources I’d otherwise want to save. For example, by combining the Brass Knuckles, Spurs, and Frankenstein Gun, all attacks deal two more damage—a great boon—but each attack consumes one of my precious six bullets. And because you must use the combo if you have it, that means you’re forced to use it even against the flimsiest of outlaws, like Barber Ian (who is also my Old West doppelgänger). Sure, you can discard an item at any time to break the combo, but it feels like there should be more incentive to use these items together.

Exploring Arrow Creek Camp with my trinkets.

After knocking out at least one Outlaw of each Clue suit and recording the order in which each suit was eliminated, the player has all the clues needed to know where the Gatling Gang is hiding (technically the player knows the location after the first three suits by consulting the clue table, since the final suit’s order is implied—but rules are rules). The player can immediately return to the map that holds the site number where the gang awaits, and it might even be a number they’ve already visited.

The boss battle works just like any other Outlaw encounter, but the Gatling Gang is a little stronger, having eight health and only two rounds before they’ll hit for a whopping three damage. Depending on how the player has fared to that point, they should have acquired enough extra health to survive two or, ideally, three rounds. Any less won’t cut it unless there’s some real hot dice rolling. At this point in the game, it’s for all the stakes; either the player bests the Gatling Gang or dies trying. Yet the tension feels somewhat subdued at the end of this intrepid adventure. I’d even go so far as to say the big climax is too easy. Like I mentioned earlier, encounters throughout Gun Trail are about not expending too many resources on the way to the end, but even having used almost all my bullets and having no Skill Points left to spend one game, I still came out on top by merely kicking the Gatling Gang to death by the second round. I would have loved to see a more challenging final boss battle—whether that means strengthening the Gatling Gang or adding some new conditions that make the encounter more wily and demanding.

Trail Markers that help track which encounters comes from which area.

As it is, the most challenging part of the game is the journey the player takes—literally. Successfully navigating the complex, overlapping mazes that constitute the town of Gravelton, Crimson Sands, and the other colorful maps is treacherous, especially if the player accidentally winds up in a map they’ve already visited. The notches on the pocket watch add up quickly, and suddenly realizing there’s an outstanding Clue to be found while only two more segments remain on the meter demands careful attention to these tight, intricate maps. This all means that the most tense part of the game isn’t the climactic battle at the end, but the steadily ticking clock that tolls the elusion of the target, dispersed throughout the hunt itself, where most of the game happens, and where most of the story is told.

In this way, Gun Trail reminds me of why I’ve been hooked on Westerns lately. The scenes, venues, and characters of the Old West are ripe for story-telling. Despite the hero’s courageous pursuit of frontier villainy, it’s never just about the final showdown, but rather the epic escapades from which they escape, the colorful character they encounter, and the oft-circuitous paths they take to journey’s end. In that way, Salogni’s game feels true to the genre: the real tension isn’t whether you’ll outdraw the villain, but whether you’ll outlast the road. It plays like a short Western vignette—dusty and flavorful—delivering exactly what it promises even as it leaves me wishing for just a touch more danger at the end.

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Designer: Marco Salogni

Artist: Marco Salogni

Publisher: Self-published

Player Count: Solitaire

Play Time: 45 minutes

👍 excellent story-telling potential, immersive and thematic in a small package, challenging maze puzzle

👎 trinkets could use some tweaking and the final boss battle should be tougher