by Gregory J, 24 April 2025
Gunfight Royale is the perfect game for a fun night with friends and family. It’s a light, easy to learn game that is great fun. Gunfight Royale is an Old West shootout game where gunfighters, desperados, and misfits fight it out in the town of Gunpowder Gulch.
“You’re a daisy if you do.”
Each player controls one or two characters that roam through the town collecting items, shooting opponents, challenging a player to a duel, playing dirty tricks and achieving objectives. Each character starts out with one or two weapons from knives to revolvers to rifles or shotguns and a bounty on their head.
click images to enlarge
Gunpowder Gulch is set up like an iconic Old Western town with a saloon, bank, general store, livery stable, outhouses, animals, wagons, and sagebrush. The map is divided into squares for movement. Scattered around the map are “?” where a character can pick up random items, pulled from the Weapons & Items deck, which are placed in their inventory.
Each character has a character card that keeps track of their health, hand and leg wounds, and inventory. The character starts with 9 health chips, six white and three red, “mortally wounded” chips. Under certain conditions, a player is stunned and receive a blue stun chip. When a character runs out of health chips, they are dead, and they drop all their inventory in the spot where they fell. The characters items are now available to for pick up by other players.
The Setup
The game comes with six scenarios, three team based and three free-for-all setups. Each scenario has specific game objectives.
The Game
Each turn a player can perform two actions.
- Move Actions: Run, Walk, Crawl, and Climb.
- Attack Actions: Shoot, Throw, Brawl, and Aim.
- Inventory Actions: Loot, Reload, Weapon Switch, and Drop.
Movement is determined by rolling one D3 to walk or two D3 to run. You may crawl or climb one space.
You may shoot an enemy if they are within 180-degrees of your front. Determine the range in squares to your target.
The Challenge: If the player and the target are within six squares and the target can see the player shooting, the target can Challenge the shooter. Each player rolls a D3. The high roller shoots first.
Check the Accuracy Chart and adjust for your final accuracy. Roll a D20. A roll equal to or below your final accuracy number scores a hit. Pull a Wound card for the result. The target draws a Dirty Trick card which may be played at any time during the game.
The Lone Rider of Eternity: The first time a player becomes mortally wounded, The Lone Rider of Eternity becomes activated. At the end of each turn, roll two D3 and move the Lone Rider along the time track. If the rider lands on a space with instructions, resolve those immediately. When the rider reaches the end of the time track the game ends.
Winning the Game: Total all the bounties collected by each player. The player with the highest bounty total wins the game.
Review
Our gaming group has played Gunfight Royale numerous times and even the hardcore miniature gamers in the group love this game. We play with six to eight players at a time. Once you go through the first couple of game turns, you have the rules down and the game play goes quickly. There is never any down time while you are not the active player because you can play Dirty Tricks cards at any time in the game. This is a game that may be played by your gaming group or even on family game nights. I highly recommend this game as it has always given us great fun when we have played.
Getting the Game:
The game is available at Knuckleduster Miniatures
- The Economy Version – This version has cardboard Character Chits.
- The Gold Edition – This version comes with figures of each character, 12 total.
There are also add-ons that you can get. I went all-in and purchased the edition with figures, the Mankillers expansion character set, the Mountaineers, expansion character set, the Big Shots expansion character set, and The Bear. Playing with the Bear is a total blast.
They do have the characters available in stl files if you want to print your own.
One last mention, Knuckleduster has just come out with a module so you can play Gunfight Royale on a tabletop with the map board. They offer this as a free download on their site.
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