Western Legends: Ante Up Expansion Review

Like with our review of the Blood Money expansion, we are tackling the Ante Up expansion review in a similar way – we will highlight what is new to Western Legends and whether or not you will want to add any of these modules to your game. If you haven’t yet, check out why we think Blood Money  is a great add to your Western Legends experience! Alright, let’s look at Ante Up!

Before diving into all the modules, we need to talk about the brand new boards. Two boards are added to the original board. One of these boards is the train board – yes, now you can rob trains! – and the other introduces the idea of a new frontier, with a brand new, fledgling town to explore, and a bunch of properties that you can help populate.

Blizzard Gulch: A new town means to stuff, and that is true of Blizzard Gulch as well! There is now yet another location for players to purchase items, this time from a trading post. The supply of items is definitely smaller, but it does provide some unique items you won’t find anywhere else! Brand new items like the Gazette and the Snake Oil are great additions to the game. A new weapon is also included as well.

Event Cards: Guess what? Wanted a bit more randomness to your game of Western Legends? Now you have it in the form of event cards. These are actually a lot of fun, doing random things when drawn and resolved. It’s not all bad though, as it can drop random nuggets on the board, and so much more. Again, this is such a minor addition to the game but it adds so much, so I wouldn’t hesitate to use these in all my games of Western Legends!

Gambler Track: One issue we always had with Western Legends was that gambling felt so unbelievably underused. Most players only gambled if they literally had nothing else to do outside of wasting an action. There wasn’t enough reward for the risk. That changes a bit with Ante Up, which now has a Gambler Track that players can move up, earning benefits and points.

Faro Game: Speaking of gambling, the new board includes a new gambling game players can do instead of Poker called Faro. Historically, this fits with the timeframe of Western Legends perfectly, and therefore it is understandable that this exists. It’s not something you would ever take OUT of your Western Legends games, but I’d be shocked if people played this very often. You can look-up the rules online for Faro yourself – sorry, it’s a bit hard to explain without examples – but you are essentially betting on what cards you think will get drawn from a large deck. It’s VERY luck based, and I’d argue that it’s a worse use of your turn than playing poker! This module isn’t for me, but thankfully I can just ignore it during the game if it’s too risky for me (which it is).

The Frontier: What’s a cowboy style game without some settling of the frontier. Around Blizzard Gulch is a number of homesteads waiting to be settled on. At the start of the game, each homestead location around Blizzard Gulch gets a random number, and players will need to discard Poker Cards equal to or higher than the printed number on the token plus the printed number of the space. Do that and you secure the token on that space which provides a number of bonuses like money or points! Like I said with Blood Money, this is the type of module that can water down a 2 or 3 player game, but fits REALLY well with 4+ players!

The Train: This might be the coolest part of this expansion – a train that you can rob! The train will slowly move around the board on every players turn – yes, we forgot to move the train a LOT when we played – and players can rob the train if they want. A card is drawn from the train deck that tells you what kind of train you are robbing, and who you’ll need to fight in order to rob it! The rewards for robbing a train is outstanding, but robbing a train is one of the harder things to do!

Further to all this good stuff, there are also new tokens that can be picked up or revealed at certain locations, that will slightly alter actions that use to be pretty basic. New Poker Cards are also included, so you can mix and match cards from the base game and various expansions to tailor them to your group’s gaming style. There is also a third cattle ranch near Blizzard Gulch – all previous cattle rules apply. Again, minor additions that make such a big impact. Add in more characters, and this is just a wonderful expansion that adds so much awesome content to something I already love! Again, we highly recommend it!