Dicebreaker Recommends: Western Legends, Red Dead Redemption: The Board Game in all but name

A criticism sometimes levelled at board games in comparison to video games and their tabletop cousin, the pen-and-paper RPG, is that they lack variety. It’s only natural – with the people around the table handling the rules and pieces in place of code or the limitless human imagination, keeping the possibilities short enough to fit on a player reference card is necessary to avoid turning game night into six hours of administrative work.

This means many board games specialise in doing one or two things, and how well you perform them round after round becomes the grading factor for your final score. Pandemic? Move and remove cubes. Catan? Trade and build. Literally any dungeon-crawler? Move X squares, roll Y dice. There are some exceptions, but these tend to edge back into that foreboding territory of “two hours to learn, 12 hours to play” – your Twilight Imperiums, Campaign for North Africas, Game of Thrones: The Board Gameses. Few board games find the sweet spot between breadth and depth.

Through the saloon doors steps Western Legends, spurs jangling and hat tilted at a confident – but not cocksure – angle. Released in 2018 by designer Hervé Lemaître and publisher Kolossal Games, Western Legends is an open-world board game set in the American Wild West. Cowpoke-themed games are two-a-penny – efforts range from the train-robbing of Colt Express to the disc-flicking shootouts of Flick ’em Up – but Western Legends stands out for its ambitious, and largely successful, attempt to create a true, all-encompassing Wild West sandbox on the tabletop. A Jack Marston of all trades, if you will.

That Red Dead Redemption comparison is particularly apt, because Western Legends is easily the closest board game equivalent to Rockstar’s sweeping heists-and-hijinks sim the tabletop has to offer. Players are free to travel around the game’s map, engaging in whatever activities they feel partial to at any particular moment. You might be prospecting for gold nuggets one turn, kicking back at the local cabaret or stocking up at the town store the next. Almost every action earns ‘legendary points’, so whether you decide to make it as an infamous cattle rustler or poker player is largely up to you.