Review of Aces & Eights: Reloaded

Aces & Eights: Reloaded is the new, updated edition of the award-winning Western RPG, Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier. Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier was released in 2007 and won the Origins Game of the Year Award. Shattered Frontier provided a classless Western RPG set in an alternative history Old West, where the South won the Civil War, the Mormons kept their state of Deseret, the Cherokee founded Sequoyah, Texas remained its own country, and California became independent from Mexico. The pivotal turning point, the U.S. election of 1844, was a plausible turning point, and the causes of the Civil War which academic historians talk about as making the Civil War inevitable came to fruition. The South won the diplomatic victory and thus there is a Confederate States of America in the game. However, the history is less important than the rules, which worked for any western game (even on frontiers such as the pampas of Argentina and Australian grasslands and the savannahs of southern Africa).

Shattered Frontier used a 3d6 ability score generation and 7 ability scores, like D&D plus a Looks score for appearance. Ability scores were complemented with a percentile-based skill system and talents. Over 100 skills meant most Western occupations were covered by a skill or group of skills and the talents provided clear combat and out-of-combat bonuses. Character creation went into a character's family history and why they came West and gave skills based on their social class and whether they were rural or urban residents during their upbringing. Characters are rewarded for pursuing profession paths and achieving personal goals—making this a game with built-in player agency and which rewards long-term play. Long-term play was an explicit design goal in Shattered Frontier, and if your group likes the game, it can be done. . .

For combat, Shattered Frontier introduced a robust system using the Shot Clock and the real-time combat of the Count System. You line up the Shot Clock with where you want to shoot and roll a die and draw a poker card. You hit in the ring of your modified die roll and then the poker cards give you a quadrant. By counting up using the Count system, once a combat breaks out, you're never waiting for your turn unlike in round-based games. Once you are at your initiative, you can act. You can choose to take longer to shoot, move into cover or do anything you could do in real life. So, befitting a game of deadly combat where each fraction of a second could matter, Shattered Frontier let you have a fast and furious combat or have a more drawn out one. With proper GM control of the count cadence like an auctioneer, combat runs quickly.

In addition, Shattered Frontier had mini-games for cattle drives, frontier trials, mining, card-playing and simulating barroom brawls. Thus, if you wanted to play a deep Western game, Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier gave it to you. Unlike Deadlands and some other games, there is no magic built into Aces & Eights and no other supernatural or superscience material. So, you can play a straight western, use the official setting, or decide to add in your preferred level of other material to magic or science up the sagebrush.

Kenzer & Company decided that after a decade, it was time to revise the game and update it for new adventures. Aces & Eights: Reloaded was launched on Kickstarter in 2017 and should be available through retail channels in 2019. The changes Between Shattered Frontier and Aces & Eights: Reloaded are those of an updated version of the game rather than a game with a paradigm shift.

Aces & Eights: Reloaded also included some stretch goals for Kickstarter backers, some of which will be available in the retail channel. The Kickstarter changes include: moving four mini-games (cattle drive, chases, frontier justice and prospecting) to updated PDFs and replacing their content with more rules on horses, updating the skill system (more details in the review portion to follow), and providing digital add-ons such as cover overlays, an Excel horse generator and a Fiery Dragon western set called Rio Draco, a series of images for use on roll 20 and other VTT programs, a new town populated with 56 fully-statted and ready to use NPCs, and the Stagecoach King supplement (read in the review, pardner!).

Reloaded Review Aces & Eights: Reloaded does what its authors meant for it to do: bring back Aces & Eights and update the game so it's easier to play and enjoy. The new hardcover book, which clocks in at 384 pages, has a brief introduction, a comprehensive index, 18 chapters, and 2 transparency page Shot Clocks (regular and Shotgun). The hardcover book lacks a character sheet and two targets that the PDF has—or which are available on the Kenzer & Company website.

Chapter 1, Basic Characters, is intended for skirmish play, where characters have 3 stats: Speed, Accuracy and Hit Points. The first two determine how fast a character can start shooting and how accurate a character is at shooting and the last is how much damage they can take. All of these stats are used in the Advanced Rules, but with the Basic Rules you get the stats done with a couple of throws of some six-siders. Add in a random weapon table, and quick name and weapon tables, and you can get a gunfight going in almost no time. Chapter 2, Scrapes, is six pages of quick combat rules. This chapter introduces the basic combat concepts of Aces & Eights: the Count and the Shot Clock. Essentially, the rules of prior versions of Aces & Eights are repeated here, but it's nice to have a way to do western gunfights that is only about 10 pages.

If you want more detail for characters and combat, well chapter 3: Character Creation is for you. Chapter 3 lists all the steps, with a good summary of each of them and references to later chapters where the character creation steps are covered in more detail. A flow chart for the steps is helpful, because there are 11 steps to character creation and some of these, such as ability scores, have substeps. The major changes between Aces & Eights: Reloaded and Shattered Frontier are Reloaded clarifies that ability scores can be raised later in the game and the starting building points used to customize a character are lowered with bonus building points provided by playing more ironman-style and not swapping ability scores. Also, Rule 1 and 2 are intended to combat ruleslawyering—and follow a National Football League challenge model of requiring a quick challenge and limiting challenges so the game goes on.

Chapter 4 tells you how to generate ability scores. Intelligence, Dexterity and Wisdom are the most important scores in the game. Intelligence and Dexterity are major parts of the character's Accuracy score, which is the to-hit bonus or penalty in combat. Wisdom and Dexterity both modify Speed, which is important at the beginning of combat since acting first in a realtime system is advantageous. Above-average Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma ability scores give bonus building points to improve those skills, so the character with high Intelligence is more likely to have a lot of Intelligence-based skills or a very high Intelligence-based skill and the high Charisma character will have some social skills. Fame and Reputation, which both drive combat in the game and how NPCs react to characters, are also discussed in this chapter. Starting characters will not have much Fame unless they are ugly or pretty or have rolled high social class—they are just making a name for themselves. Reputation can be used for re-rolls and at the start of play is the average of all 7 ability scores plus the appropriate modifiers.

Chapter 5 goes into Fame and Reputation awards. You gain Fame for doing noteworthy things, even playing a bandito accused of a crime. Reputation is gained by being a 'white hat' in the West, by achieving goals and surviving and winning gunfights. Reputation is lost by being a 'black hat' and after Reputation reaches zero, a character gains Notoriety and no longer gains the bonuses to a roll or rerolls that high Reputation grants. Chapter 5 also details how Reputation is spent, how being part of a group lowers a character's Reputation towards the group mean, and how to award it. This chapter may look like 8 pages of fluff, but the Western tropes of Honor and 'white hats' and 'black hats' spur PCs to act.

Chapters 6 through 9 are the remaining portions of character creation where you roll and create your Western character. In chapter 6, Priors & Particulars, you generate the character's age, height, weight, and family background. This chapter consolidates two chapters from Shattered Frontier and having it is much easier to use. Another upgrade was allowing BP purchases for exact physical traits and in Aces & Eights, the use of building points to reroll results in this chapter is helpful. Who wants a PC with an abusive parent? Who wants a PC who is an orphan? Well, if that's not you, spend a building point (BP) and reroll. Chapter 7, quirks and flaws, gives a d1000 (roll 4 d10 and use them as thousands, hundreds, tens and ones digits) table of quirks and flaws. You can 'cherry pick' and take specific quirks or flaws for your character. You can take neither quirks nor flaws. If you do take quirks (mental and social problems) or flaws (physical problems), you get building points for them. Cherry-picked quirks and flaws are worth half as much as those rolled randomly and each quirk and flaw has a value based on how harsh it is. 5-pointers are pretty minor and those that are 20 or more define your Westerner in many ways. I like the diminishing returns with each quirk or flaw after the first being worth a cumulative five BPS less than the listed value. Take a couple of quirks and flaws for roleplaying and to get some BPs, but don't try and make a character full of problems and expect them to succeed in Aces & Eights.

Chapters 8 and 9, Skills and Talents, are the core character expense items since there are no classes. Skills are universal, meaning everyone knows a little about them and can use them, or trained, meaning a character has them or they don't. Each skill has one or more associated abilities and a cost in BPs. Aces & Eights: Reloaded vastly improved how skills are handled by adopting the way they are used in the current edition of HackMaster, Kenzer & Company's fantasy game. Each skill starts at a level equal to the worst ability score related to it (relevant ability) and when the skill is bought, the mastery die and the mastery modifier (familiar to anyone who played D&D 3e, but with a different scale) for the worst relevant ability are added to the worst relevant ability. Skills start out rolling a d12 for the mastery die and as a character gets more skilled, the die rolled to improve the skill drops. Skills range from Novice to Expert and each skill has a detailed description of what it does and some sample difficulties. There are over 100 skills, so each character can learn many of the skills found in the West, from languages and literacy to logging to carpentry to agriculture to animal herding. Talents are modifiers to combat abilities, ability score checks (such as an Intelligence roll to figure out a puzzle) or like Inheritance, give the character money. If you want to be a gunfighter, I recommend the Courage talent. At 10 BP, it means your character only runs away from a fight when you want them to, not when a lesser character might flee.

Chapter 10, Profession Paths, is a key portion of the Aces & Eights: Reloaded advancement system. Each profession path is a job the character is pursuing. Like in the Old West, people can easily change professions in Aces & Eights. Officially, you can change every session and then go back to an old path or start a new one. There are more than 50 paths and each path starts you off with a few easy actions, like opening a business for any of the artisans, or acquiring gear such as for a cowboy. You can skip one or two steps and do something higher on the list as well, so the progression on profession paths need not be exactly in order. Since most of the BPs come from profession paths, look them over and share with the other players so they can help you on the profession path. If you don't see an exact path you want, talk with the group since with the many examples, it is easy to make new ones like in the unofficial zombie supplement, The Running Death (Ennie winning free PDF by Terminal Studios).

Chapter 11 is gear and includes rules on inflation, many mundane items and services found in the West and a great deal of information on horses. The horse information includes rules on training horses, pictures of horse breeds and horse markings, and detailed ability score modifiers for horses so that a mustang and an Arabian are not the same with the same die rolls. Pick up a Sears catalog or other Western circular and you can easily figure out gear prices.

Chapter 12 is the Advanced Scrapes chapter, the major combat chapter. It would take pages and pages to describe all the detail here, but the 23 pages here give rules on using the Shotgun Shot Clock, critical hits, fumbles (including weapon malfunctions), cover, flinching when a shot is too close, unarmed and melee combat, wrestling, and using a lasso. Chapter 13 has the wounding rules. Of special interest is the wound chart section, since all hits in Aces & Eights are critical hits—however being shot for 5 points of damage has a very different effect if it's a chest wound or head wound than a wound to the leg. The wound tables make being hurt very bad, since healing in Aces & Eights using n factorial days for each wound with all wounds healing simultaneously. Thus, a 4-point wound takes (4+3+2+1) 10 days of rest to heal without medical help or high Constitution or talents. So, what does this mean if you don't have magic or science to change combat? It means that in Aces & Eights, you really want to carefully consider every fight you enter because it could be your last.

My recommendation for those people just figuring out the gunfighting rules is to play using the rules in Chapter 2, Scrapes, then work your way one rule at a time into Advanced Scrapes and implement fully with characters you care about once you understand the rules. Many of the Advanced Scrapes rules are pretty intuitive—line up the shot with the Shot Clock and if they have cover you need to do more damage than the cover value if trying to shoot through it. Get a shot close to the target and they might flinch. Oh, and like in many Westerns, the doctor can kill you, so don't get infected wounds!

Chapter 13 also includes disease, poison and alcohol and drugs rules for things that slow down a cowpoke. . . Chapter 14 is the brawling system, where barroom brawls are simulated with betting mechanism and poker chips of red, white and blue (strength, endurance and agility and linked to STR, CON and DEX). This system isn't fast and is fiddly—it is a carryover from Shattered Frontier that could have been improved. You bet chips and get some back each round, except for white chips, the endurance chips, some of which are automatically lost to the 'house' in the rake.

Chapters 15 through 18 are the campaign game parts of Aces & Eights. Chapter 15 introduces the Cauldron, the sandbox area around Durango, Colorado, that is the base location for the game. It also has 7 skirmish scenarios, over 100 adventure seeds and advice on how to campaign. Change the towns and you'll find the advice and scenarios work nicely in any Western. Speaking of towns, while it's not in the book, the new town of Harshaw Creek in the Kickstarter is a great sandbox. You've got 56 NPCs in a struggling town that the PCs can make or break and the map of town and the backstories plus rules on the costs and time to construct buildings give you what you need to go. Definitely grab Harshaw Creek if you want some sandbox Western small-town gaming. Also included in this chapter are historical Western gunfighters and some characters that Kickstarter backers submitted.

Chapter 16 is the awards chapter, giving the GM advice on how awards work. It also explains how profession paths work in more detail than chapter 10. Since characters are more than just their work, it has examples of the main other way to earn BPs in Aces & Eights to improve your character: personal goals. Personal goals must be pursued in order, one at a time and can be as simple as buying a horse or as complex as opening a mine. Personal goals may never be the same as a profession path goal! Since Aces & Eights is a game about living in the Old West or on a similar frontier, success in a character's goals and monetary rewards are the main indicators of success for a player. This is a different motivation than many fantasy games where acquiring loot by besting foes is the main goal. Chapter 17 is the chapter on Gambling, and provides not only a discussion of frontier games such as faro, but also rules on how the Gambling skill is used to cheat in Aces & Eights. It's a nice short chapter that gets you to playing without much fuss.

Chapter 18 is the official history of the setting, and really didn't change much from Shattered Frontier. There's a minor timeline update, but like the West, much of the history is going to be written as people live in it and try to tame the land. If you don't like the official history, just ditch it and go with your own history—the rest of the rules will work fine without it and you'd just change the origin tables in chapter 6 to fit your locale.

Overall, the rules are a little better than Shattered Frontier, because they have been grouped appropriately and the most difficult part of the game, the character creation system was improved by moving to a simpler and more intuitive system for generating skills. The layout is improved with the use of ribbons, as introduced in the current edition of HackMaster. Each page which isn't a full art page or game play handout has a colored sidebar 'ribbon tab' with the chapter number and name. Even in the PDF, this vastly speeds up your search for the rules you want. The index is thorough and easy to use.

The artwork in the book, like Shattered Frontier, is black-and-white illustrations and color art. The black-and-white illustrations are of Kenzer & Company staff, or Western archival photos or illustrations, or are those of backers who submitted characters. The full-color maps of the default towns, the Cauldron and North America are excellent. Your full-color art is by Rembrant, Russell and other famous Western painters, so just reading the book should make you feel like you are in the West. I believe Kenzer & Company hit their target. They've brought back an excellent Western RPG and made it more accessible. Once this hits retail, you should be able to easily grab the game and joining fans old and new for some Western fun. Thanks for reading, pardner!

Rating Substance 5 (game with lots of excellent rules to fit genre and kept the good stuff while improving ease of play) Style 4 (some errata on tables, in profession path goals and no target silhouettes in physical version)