French and Indian War Skirmish Using “A Fistful of Lead”

 In my recent post I mentioned the HAWKs Geezer Games which I have been able to participate in due to my retirement.  There is an even more unofficial custom of gathering for games on Mondays.  I volunteered to run yesterday’s game, and decided that it was time to pull out the 40mm French and Indian War figures.  These, according to my logs, were last out for a solo game in early September 2023, just over two years ago. 

I have been wanting to try A Fistful of Lead for some time, ever since I saw a group playing a science fiction game using the specialized variant Galactic Heroes during a HAWKs game day a few years ago. My thought at the time was that I would run a game using the 54mm semi-flat home cast Buck Rogers figures, although I still have not (yet) done that.  As noted, I had the opportunity to play in a colonials game at Gen Con using the Bigger Battles variant, and I enjoyed that. So, it seemed like a good time to give it a try.

Because we were playing at someone else’s house, and I knew we were going to be learning the rules, I did not carry much scenery with me, so this tabletop is not as picturesque as I might like it to be, so I didn’t take too many pictures as we went along.  I kept to a simple set up.  The four corners of the table were covered in woods (represented here by the darker green cloth).  Two log cabins were in a clearing in the center of the table, separated by a small stream.  We had four players, so I assembled two groups of French and Indian raiders, each with seven figures and each including a group of three untried youths, one group of five British colonial settlers plus a group of four non-combatants occupying the clearing around the cabins, and one group of five British settler militia from the next valley over.  The French objective was to burn the cabins and capture the non-combatants; the British objective to drive off the French.

In the first game I played the arriving militia, and did not do well, losing my leader and being about lose a second militiaman, while being unable to prevent the raiders from burning the small cabin. The local settlers took more casualties and had little ability to defend the larger cabin and the non-combatants against the raiders.   So we called it, broke for lunch, switched sides and tried again.

This time the settler elected to defend both cabins (having abandoned the small cabin in the first game), and my raider team was unable to do much against the defenders, although I did eventually eliminate the settler leader with a lucky shot.  My fellow raider lost all but one of his figures, so we called that one a settler victory.

The main feature distinguishing A Fistful of Lead from other skirmish games is the activation system using a standard deck of playing cards.  Each player is dealt a hand of cards (one per figure) at the start of each turn.  Activations occur in order, from Kings down to Twos, with Aces being wild cards.  Certain of the cards provide special actions (e.g. heal a wound marker, combat bonus, automatic reload), so there is some strategy inherent in choosing which figure to activate when you have the next card to be played.  Turns generally moved along quickly, and the mechanics are pretty simple.  Most of them are laid out pretty well on a one page QRS.  The activation system is designed, among other things, to support multi-player games, which is a plus.

Everyone seemed happy with the rules, so I expect that there will be more of this in the future.

My only quibbles were that the QRS would have benefitted from including a list of the possible actions, and that (in common with a lot of the skirmish games we play) status markers end up creating a lot of table clutter.  If I planned to run this as a convention showcase game, I would wish to put some effort into making some more unobtrusive markers.