Devilry Afoot in the Canadian North

This past weekend, Arthur and I visited Victoria, where Corey and Brian introduced us to Devilry Afoot (DA), an RPG-lite skirmish game based on 17th-Century monster hunters.  We had a great time hunting a pack of werewolves.  So of course I bought a copy of the rules so that we can play it ourselves!  Coincidently Arthur is currently painting up some of Bob Murch's Flint and Feather settlers in New France and New England.  They're not ready yet, however, so as an interim we decided to play in a proxy setting and instead played the Hunger scenario, relocated to 1920s Yukon.  Tyler and Oliver joined Arthur, each taking two hunters, while I attempted to be the gamemaster.

In the Hunger scenario, a group of hunters sets out in advance of a winter storm to protect a community from the raging of what I've decided to call a "forest spirit".  It's supposed to be a Wendigo, but my model looks more like a Sasquatch.

The board in DA is small, only 2'x2'.  In this case, the forest spirit is stalking a group of houses in one corner of the board, while the hunters arrive on the opposite corner.  The blue strips mark the boundary of the playing space.

Hunters arrive on the board.

Activation is randomly determined by pulling chits from a bag.  Here we can see a couple of hunters working to pin the forest spirit in place as other hunters work around on the flank.

Activations are never guaranteed, either!  The lady in the red coat was successful with multiple activations and advanced quickly across the table, but her friends had a few failures and as a result moved forward more slowly.  This did not work out very well for the goodwife in red!

The forest spirit then got a few consecutive activations, and was able to move and attack the goodwife, inflicting two wounds!

On the forest spirit's next activation, the beast chose an intimidate attack, which caused goodwife to flee from the table.  However, her comrades stood firm!

Despite the loss of the goodwife, the remaining hunters continued to stalk the forest spirit.

The spirit then turned on the wealthy gentleman's assistant, wounding him.

On his next activation, the gentleman, with no concern for his assistant's safety, turned and fired on the forest spirit, and ended the game!

As this was our first playthrough of DA without the guidance of a more experienced player, so as I re-read the rulebook I am certain I will find that we made many errors.  It was still great fun, and we will definitely play more games, both in the 1920s Yukon proxy setting as well as in the 17th Century once Arthur's new figures are ready.

For anyone interested, I simply used straight substitutions of weaponry for the hunters.  Modern rifles use the same stats as flintlocks.  Modern revolvers substitute for black powder pistols.  We handwaved reloading with the idea that anyone shooting will go full Hollywood-style blazing away, so they need to reload after each shot!