Tonight I thought I’d feature another card game. Amber and I read Rapunzel’s Revenge earlier this week, so I decided to stick with the Wild West theme.
Bang!
created by Emiliano Sciarra, published by daVinci games
“The Outlaws hunt the Sheriff. The Sheriff hunts the Outlaws. The Renegade plots secretly, ready to take one side or the other. Bullets fly. Who among the gunmen is a Deputy, ready to sacrifice himself for the Sheriff? And who is a merciless Outlaw, willing to kill him? If you want to find out, just draw (your cards)!”
This card game recreates an old-fashioned spaghetti western shoot-out, with each player randomly receiving a Character card to determine special abilities, and a secret Role card to determine their goal. All the roles are kept facedown, except the Sheriff, so it may take a little while to figure out who’s on which side.
There are Bang! cards to shoot with, guns that have different ranges, Missed and Dodge cards and horses that give you an advantage. Beer can restore your health, which is nice.
We play with the Dodge City Expansion, which expands the number you can play with to 3-8. We each have our personal favorite characters, I’m sure, but we randomly hand out two options to each player, allowing them to pick which of those two they want to be. We also choose roles randomly, so no one gets to be (or has to be) the sheriff several times.
This is a great game, mostly because of the theme, I think. The one problem is that occasionally it can really drag at the end. We played two games last Friday. During the first one, I was an outlaw and the game only went one round, with the outlaws killing the Sheriff before he got his second turn. We had five players, by the way. The second game came down to the Sheriff, me, and an Outlaw. I swear the two of us took forever to finish out the game. It probably was only like 15 minutes after the others were all dead, but that seems like a long time in this game when there’s only two left. At that point, I was honestly hoping the dynamite would blow one of us up, and I hate dynamite. Finally, the Outlaws did win, but I think it was the Indians who actually killed me.
Overall, it’s a really fun game, probably good for kids 9 and up, although Amber hasn’t tried playing it yet. I’ll have to get it out one of these days while she’s still awake. If I were buying it now, though, I would definitely buy Bang!- The Bullet!, which includes the original game and three expansions – Dodge City, High Noon and A Fistfull of Cards.