Disclaimer: A copy of Pioneers in Peril was provided by the designer for review

I don’t normally begin reviews by talking about the production, but in the case of Pioneers in Peril, the production is the star of the show. A fully wooden, hand made game by designer Matt Terry in his solar and wind powered garage. This game isn’t just another product, it’s obviously a passion project, marrying a love of board games, wood working, and western story telling.

Pioneers in Peril stands out on your shelf because of it’s all wood production. When you lift the lid and start riffling through the hundreds of wooden chits, you’ll smell the cut wood, you’ll feel a splinter here and there, and you’ll see the imperfections that make every copy of this game unique. A whole big game made my one guy in his garage is the kind of artistry that I want to see more of in the board game scene, and I applaud Matt Terry in taking this approach. Instead of shipping files off to China for a quick print, he’s built himself a tiny production facility and his labour of love truly shines through. And this has to be a labour of love, because there are a lot of wooden pieces in the box, all laser cut and assembled by hand. It’s rustic and handmade, it feels purpose built rather than cheaply produced.

I’ll be the first to say that I don’t want every single one of my games to get this all wood treatment, but for Pioneers in Peril, it fits the theme. The handmade wooden aesthetic fits the old west pioneer setting so very well. The game starts with the centre tile, showing the bank, store, blacksmith, school, church, and saloon, and nothing more. Beyond the edges of town is wilderness, yet to be explored. On your turn, should you choose to, you’ll press yourself against the boundaries of the map and reveal what lies beyond.

A 4x game at its heart, Pioneers in Peril wants you to Explore, Expand, exploit and exterminate. Moving has you rolling a D6 (and doubling the number if you have a horse), then exploring has you revealing tiles as you walk your pieces into empty space. Forests, mountains, pastures, fields, rivers, deserts, all these land types also represent a resource that can be extracted and exploited. You’ll stake a claim, build buildings, and then you’ll need to defend your buildings from your competitors. You’ve staked this land, so you need to defend it from interlopers.

Also there’s a bandit that needs shooting every now and then, lest he causes havoc, but I’ll touch on him later.

One of the first things that struck me about Pioneers in Peril is just how much stuff there is. Both in the box and in the game. On your turn, each of your pioneers can do 2 actions, and there are, and I kid you not, 16 actions in this game. Most are fairly simple, like praying where pay $2 and draw a card (unless you have less than $5, then praying is free). And that rule example of “Do a thing, except for in this circumstance”, is fairly indicative of the entire rulebook. There are different win conditions and consequences for shootouts, depending on the participants. Player vs. Player, Player vs. Bandit, Sheriff vs. player, and Sheriff vs. Bandit, all of these scenarios exist, and requires the person holding the rulebook to remember what to do in each of those scenarios.

What I’m getting at here is that this game, production and rules both, are not Svelte, elegant productions. They don’t achieve a great deal with minimal components or rules overhead. Instead, they’re bulky, cumbersome at times, but if this is the kind of game you have a craving for, it’ll satisfy that craving like few other games will.

A game of Pioneers in Peril ends when someone achieves 20 points, and you earn points by having pioneers, buildings, homesteads, and diplomas. Each round you activate your workers and explore the land, adding hex tiles to the board. The hex tiles can be useful, developable land, like mountains, forests, and pastures, each land type will support a specific industry. But it can also be unforgiving and tough terrain, such as Deserts and Canyons. Should you so desire, as an action, you can pay some cash to stake a claim on a tile. Then in a future action, you can pay some more cash to build a building on that tile. If you happen to build a Ranch, Farm, Mine, or Sawmill, you’ll roll a dice and place that many resources onto that building. As yet another future action, you can choose to process that resource, provided you own the corresponding tool, like an ax for processing timber from a sawmill or a pickaxe for pulling coal from a mine.

In case you were wondering, if someone develops a coal mine and then wanders off, yes, you can sneak in behind them and pull coal from their building. Doing so is likely to get you shot, however.

So all these actions serve to earn you resources, which you can then use to sell or trade with. Because at the end of the day, all the things that earn you points cost money. Expanding your homestead costs a lot of money, but doing so allows you to have more pioneers in Peril. Of course that means you have more mouths to feed, and failing to feed those mouths will result in your pioneers perishing. Cash also works for tuition, earning your pioneers a diploma, giving you a special ability for the rest of the game. Again, 20 point of buildings, pioneers, and diplomas is how you win the game.

The last thing the players do on their turn is move the bandit. He starts off the board, but slowly crawls down a track before entering Peril. The bandit has a bunch of rules dictating where he wants to go (largely the saloon to buy a drink), but he can and will hold players up. Players can choose to have a shootout, or just succumb to the holdup, in which they roll the dice and lose that amount of money from their supply to the bandit.

At this point, I’ve mentioned the shootout a couple of times, so lets dig into that. Unlike the rest of Pioneers in Peril, which is a economic game about buying and selling goods to build a wild west empire, the shootout is more reminiscent of Dutch Blitz. Both players take their decks, ante up the number of bullets they want to spend on this encounter, then SPRAY AND PRAY BABY!!!!

*ahem*, I mean, both players count down, Three, Two, One, Draw! then both players flip over cards one at a time as fast as they can until one player pulls a HIT card and that player shouts HIT. The attacker deck has a single hit card out of the 10 in the deck while the defender has 2 hit cards. You only get to flip as many cards as bullets you put up for ante, and if you chose to put up less than 10 bullets, well, you might just never hit anything.

This shootout mechanic is quite a change of pace from the rest of the game, it’s fast and frenetic. I won’t lie and say my heart didn’t beat a little faster when I stared into the eyes of my enemy, wondering which one of us was going to walk away from this encounter alive. The player who looses the shootout, loses their pioneer, and the winner has the chance to loot the body, adding insult to injury.

Pioneers in Peril is an interesting game. It’s economic focus on building and accruing wealth, and using that wealth efficiently to earn the points required to win make it feel like a euro game. But the randomness from the 6 sided die and the shootout mechanics keep one boot firmly planted into the amerithrash zone (although that’s not a term I’ve used for a long time). I think players who really prefer economic games will feel frustrated by this experience in more than one turn. The events can bestow random blessings and just as quickly take them away each round, the D6 might mean the mine you spent so much time and effort building only spits out a single nugget of coal. Sometimes life is unfair, and Pioneers in Peril leans into that cosmic irony.

In fact, Pioneers in Peril leans into a lot of that difficult homesteader lifestyle. From the production, to the aesthetic, to the boons and banes doled out seemingly at random. It captures that feeling that life and the world is always against you. You constantly need to worry about your food supplies, if your industries are producing, and worry if some ne’er-do-well is going to try to steal what you’ve worked so hard to achieve. Maybe you’ll be that person, because you desperately need just a little more food to feed your growing family, and someone left their field unattended. Maybe you’re just 2 dollars short of your next milestone, and a shootout is the fastest way to get that cash. Maybe you’ll do it, just because its fun to be an agent of chaos and your opponent is only one turn away from winning the game.

Pioneers in Peril is a rules dense game, but the rules almost always make sense thematically, making it a bit easier to digest. The whole game feels like the theme was in mind from the first moments of conception, rather than a window dressing pasted on after the fact. Maybe it’s the fresh cut wood smell in my nose, but playing this game certainly made me feel like we were toiling away in the western frontiers.

It’s a very sandbox-y game, one where you aren’t going to follow a scripted opening every time you play. Pioneers in Peril isn’t going to end in 90 minutes, every time you play. The game will ebb and flow as players expand and constrict. Having more stuff means more points, but it also means having more stuff to protect. I can’t deny the feel-bad moments when someone is making progress on their goals, only for the rug to be pulled out from under them by a devastating event or a shootout gone wrong. There are rules where players can lower the point threshold for victory, and even rules for players to leave and/or join mid game and what to do with all of that players stuff. Players can be eliminated from the Wild West. I think a lot of players will chafe at that idea, but I also think Pioneers in Peril is doing something a little special here.

In an era of companies off-shoring productions to cheaper regions, and AI slop showcasing the lazy producers urge to do things the cheapest, easiest way possible, I can’t help but admire Matt Terry and Deadwood Games. This is a game he built himself in his garage. This isn’t just another SKU to have on store shelves, but it’s a labour of love. And I think some of the rules sprawl I mentioned earlier is indicative of this; this is a game that he loves. It hasn’t been honed down to a fine edge, developed away all the potential pain points with blind play testers, and turned the game into a bland, samey experience. While the take-that aspects and potential to lose some of what I built are not things that I enjoy in my games, I feel like this game is exactly what Matt loves, and I can’t help by applaud his ambition as he toiled away in his garage, making the game of his dreams. I admire and cheer on this intensely independent creation, and encourage you to do the same.

Pioneers in Peril is live on Gamefound on Sept. 1st, 2026