Tiny Epic Western

Tiny Epic Western

So this showed up in my mailbox while I was off at the convention. MadJay Brown​ and I got a chance to get through it, figure it out.

This is my second Tiny Epic game; the first was Tiny Epic Galaxies. In both cases, these are just bafflingly dense little games. Like, how does the designer get so many little interlocking economies packed into this thing? Western is even denser than Galaxies so the particle physicists might want to pay attention to whatever the next game in the line is, if they want answers about where all the dark matter in the galaxy went.

It plays four and is pretty symmetrical, other than getting dealt a “leader” or something. You’re buying buildings and improving your position in one of three “industries” that are getting voted on throughout the game. To work out who won in each position (there’s a worker placement element), you play out a 3-card poker hand, which is very amusing: between each of six cards are six poker cards, and you just go around pair by pair to see the hands: straights, flushes, whatevers.

Anyway, cheap and smart and not a filler. It’s got all the western genre tropes, including the gross ones (savage noble noble savage, saloon whore, etc.), so be warned.

5 thoughts on “Tiny Epic Western”

  1. Keith Stetson same. Both for above trope-related reasons and because it looks so arcane on the table. Some folks were playing it at the game store on Sunday and in the time it took for us to collectively kill Advanced La Capitan in Sentinels of the Multiverse, they finished a round.

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