Western Legends

Herve Lemaitre (2018)

9/10

Western Legends is a game unlike all the others I usually play. Before I ever learned the traditional genre distinctions of "euro" or "strategy" games, I knew to call this one "thematic." It's just oozing with theme. In fact, played with the right crowd, it can seem more like a story than a game at times, in all the best ways. That theme is of course the Wild West, with which I am intimately familiar. And not just in a caricature way, though there is that, too. It is brimming with historical characters. I don't remember how many, but more than you'd think, complete with backstories. Characters you normally wouldn't think someone would even want to embody, like the hanging judge Roy Bean. How many people even know who that is? I do, but I suspect most don't!

The game is a sandbox. Anything you can imagine doing in an Old West scene is doable. Do you want to prospect gold, sell it to the bank, to buy a donkey, to help you carry more gold to the bank in your prospecting? That's the first way I saw the game won? Do you want to be a villain on the run from the law? That's a major mechanic! Do you want to be a white hat hero who chases them down? Equally important! Proper cowboying, taking the cattle to market, gambling at the saloon, hiring the services of prostitutes, robbing trains, robbing other players, fighting bandits, getting injured, it's all there. There are even story cards for completing certain tasks, if that's not specific enough for you.

Does that seem like a lot? Well, it is. There are lots of expansions. It is a beast to setup and put away. It will take up your whole game night. It feels almost pointless to say it's a table hog. But it's not actually that complex. There are a million things to do, so there's a bit of overhead learning early on, but it fades away almost immediately because everything is designed in a sensible way and makes sense with the theme. That's really an underrated feature to have when so many games have themes painted on in slapdash fashion these days. Here it is clear there was none other in mind from the ground up.

And it's fun! The most important thing of all. There are so few games I can describe this way, but I genuinely don't care how it pans out or who wins in this one. It's fun to just play around in the sandbox, or make up stories of what happened. I have played other games, like Oath, which aspire to this and hand you a literal notebook with which you are told to chronicle your adventures. Those seem like literal chores added on, whereas in Western Legends, I feel so satisfied at the end of a session that I actually want to make one up. This is, ultimately, what the word "legend" means. A story worth writing about!