Bang is a very thematic wild west game where you get to shoot your friends. At the start of the game, everyone gets a role (sheriff, outlaw, renegade or deputy), which also comes with its own goal for how he wants to win the game. It’s a fun game to play but it’s one that rarely hits my table: let’s take a look at why and see if this is the kind of game for you and your group.

Let’s look at the game play so we can understand what it does well. All players get a character and a role. Each character has his or her own special abilities that will give their player an advantage in the game. Each role will determine how that player wins the game. Whoever is sheriff reveals his role; his is the only non-secret role. He wins by killing the outlaws and renegade. The outlaws win by killing the sheriff. The renegade wins by being the last man standing (killing all the outlaws and then and only then killing the sheriff). The deputy wins if the sheriff wins.

It must be noted that no, the game does not come with live ammunition to track hit points. But it should.

Mike Hulsebus | Contributor

The coolest thing about the game is that it matters who you’re sitting next since seating order affects who you can shoot. People that you are directly adjacent to are 1 distance away from you. Each other person is considered one distance farther. When you start the game, you can only shoot at people 1 distance away until you get a gun card. You can also get horse cards that make other players see as if you are farther away. So if I were to get a mustang, the people on each side of me would see me as one more distance away, meaning they would need a gun that could shoot 2 or farther to hit me.

Players take turns collecting better weapons, throwing people in jail, and trying to shoot those that they think are their enemies with Bang cards. Thematically, everything works.

I want to talk about what makes it so hard to get to the table: the rules. Everything that a card can do is represented by symbols. We’ve seen similar things in Race for The Galaxy. But unlike Race for the Galaxy where the actions are intuitive (a picture of a card with a money arrow means “sell a good”), there are cards that just say “see rules.” Take, for example, General Store. Rather than saying “Reveal cards from the deck equal to the number of players. Starting with yourself and going clockwise, each player takes a card” it just has a little icon of a book that says “see rules”. For the first game or two, players will have to pass the rulebook around every time they draw cards. I think I could teach Race for the Galaxy quicker to a group of four players (Race plays 2-4 players, Bang plays 4-7 and I think they would have more fun playing Race than playing Bang.

The cards in Bang just have too many special cases. Panic, for example, is a card whose symbols say “Draw a card” and “from anyone you’re sitting next to” but without reading the rules you would have no way of knowing that you can also use this to steal a card that’s sitting in front of them.

This is why I never get to play this game. It’s a game that, while fun, I don’t want to introduce to new people because that first game takes a long time to stumble through. I feel like I have to take everyone through the deck and say “this is an Indians card, it does this. This is a Panic card, it does this” for each card, and that’s overwhelming to a new player.

I can also see where some people would have a problem with the initial turns of the game and how “random” they are. At the start, no one has done anything that would give away what their role card is, and so it’s hard to know who to shoot at and so sometimes people have to get randomly shot. There’s plenty of “you made me discard my gun, so now I’m going to come after you” payback until it starts to materialize who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I don’t mind the randomness of these first few turns because this is a light card game, not an intense, strategic affair.

That is the problem with getting this game to the table: It doesn't really work well with many groups of people. It requires too much rules explanation for family or non-gamers. For gamers, it requires a good amount of rules explanation just so that you can play a light card game when there are other filler games you could play with less rules explanation. Games are variable length so if time is an issue, it’s not a game you know will fit in a specific time frame. And players are eliminated so when someone dies they have to wait for the game to end to get to play again.

Yes, I’ve got a lot of problems with Bang, but I still like Bang. I like the limiting factor of only being able to shoot people a certain distance away, making it harder to gauge each player’s role. I like playing Bang cards hoping that your opponent doesn’t have a missed card. I like how every player gets a character rather than it just being a generic “draw from the same mutual deck” game. There are also some special scoring rules online that players can use to keep score over multiple games that I’m looking forward to trying out next month.

Despite all the issues I have with the game listed above, I do really think that the game works well within a certain group of people if you have a regular group of four or more players with whom you can play. Once you do the work and get past that long, first game spent learning, Bang is a game where the experience players get playing the game transcends the rule problems.

Mike Hulsebus finally made it a week without mentioning what a great game Dominion is. You can send your congratulations to mikehulsebus@gmail.com