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= Western Gunfight Wargame Rules =

Western Gunfight Wargame Rules is a Western skirmish wargame first published in 1970 by Steve Curtis, Mike Blake and Ian Colwill. Later editions were released under a variety of other titles such as The Old West Gunfight Rules 1816-1900 and Old West Gunfight Role Playing Game. The game is noteworthy both because Western Gunfight was one of the earliest published skirmish wargames and because it could be considered an early tabletop role-playing game.

Gameplay
Like other skirmish games, players of Western Gunfight control one or more miniature models, each of which represents a single character. Characters have individual ratings in skills such as hand-to-hand combat and revolver talent. The first two editions used only six-sided dice, but Blake, Colwill and Curtis developed a new percentile-based system using twenty-sided dice for their 1972 game The Colonial Skirmish Wargame Rules, which was incorporated into Western Gunfight from the third edition onward.

Narrative Approach
Western Gunfight was not the first wargame to use an individual scale. Some earlier wargames of the mid to late 1960s, such as Modern War in Miniature and Fight in the Skies, had focused for controlling individual soldiers or pilots, respectively. However, an even more character- and narrative-driven approach to wargaming was encouraged in the rules to Western Gunfight, and more extensively promoted in articles and play reports published by its designers in gaming fanzines such as Wargamer's Newsletter. Western Gunfight Wargame Rules was inspired by Western films, and the first edition rulebook directed players to "Create Interesting Games with These Rules." Beginning with the second edition, players were instructed to select a "personal figure" to play, creating a one-to-one correspondence between players and their characters. This would come to be a distinctive characteristic of Dungeons & Dragons and subsequent role-playing games.

"Individual Wargaming", Stock characters, Scenarios

"Is it really Wargaming"

Play both sides

Impact
Miniature wargames of the 1950s and 1960s tended to focus on medium- to large-scale conflicts, with each model aggregately representing multiple combatants. To represent the smaller, more personal scale action of Western fiction, Western Gunfight Wargame Rules adopted a "man-to-man" scale in which each model represented a single figure. This style of wargaming proved immediately popular—the first print run of Western Gunfight quickly sold out, and an expanded second edition was released in 1971 to meet the demand.

Western Gunfight and Colonial Skirmish influenced the design of the wargame Reaper, a precursor to Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

Popularity, 2nd edition, American printing

Skirmish Wargames, Chainmail

Its development and release in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s and early 1970s was contemporary with David Wesely's experimental Braunstein games that contributed to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in the United States. A Western-themed "Braunstein" called Brownstone may have been inspired by play reports of Western Gunfight published in fanzines. Gary Gygax letter

Due to the success of Dungeons & Dragons, it became common for publishers to re-release older wargames rebranded as roleplaying games. Accordingly, Gamescience published a box set of Western Gunfight under the title Old West Gunfight Role Playing Game in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, later editions continued to brand themselves as wargames.