Western Legends gives you the chance to step into the boots of history’s greatest gunslingers and carve your own legend in its open world. Saddle up and enjoy the ride of the ultimate Wild West sandbox

Words by Matt Jarvis

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

Western Legends presents a sandbox for players to explore

Eddie Izzard once joked that if French filmmakers had put their continental spin on cowboy movies instead of the Italian influence led by Sergio Leone, the wave of revolutionary westerns released in the 1960s wouldn’t have been ‘spaghetti’ but ‘baguetti’.

That horse has long since bolted the stable onscreen, but board games may be about to go through their own ‘baguetti’ moment at the hands of Hervé Lemaître, the French first-time designer behind the ambitious, visionary Western Legends.

Despite being Lemaître’s tabletop debut, Western Legends is a confident, complex creation: part board game, part RPG, part historical simulation. Rather than give players a single strand of the Old West – the gunfights of Bang!, the cattle-driving of Great Western Trail, the questionable trading standards of Snake Oil – Lemaître has sewn together a tapestry of western life and death in the form of a sprawling open world that encompasses everything from gambling and prospecting to peacekeeping and robbing.

“It’s not like a lot of board games where, okay, it’s like: ‘I score victory points by doing this’, ‘I score victory points just by winning fights’ or ‘I score victory points by turning in resources’,” says Kolossal Games president Travis R. Chance, who took on the task of publishing Lemaître’s grand design.

“In this game, you have so many possible options for how you can convert those decisions into a potential victory, and in a way that I don’t feel is as mired and confusing as people would expect for what type of game it is. Because there’s a lot of sandbox games – there’s some games that claim to have a ‘sandbox feel’ – but this is very much: ‘You’ve got three actions, what do you want to do? Do you wanna rob a bank? Do you wanna beat up a bandit? Do you wanna go drive cattle? Do you wanna mine gold? Do you wanna sell gold? Do you wanna play poker?’ You can, literally – we have rules for our own house version of Texas hold ‘em within the game itself.”

Travis R. Chance worked with first-time designer Hervé Lemaître

Chance adds that one of the reasons he was attracted to Western Legends is that, despite its ambitions to replicate such a huge range of experiences, Lemaître proved he had the substance to make his lofty ideas actually work on the table.