Bang!

25th July 2021

Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Bang!

The American west could be an ornery, dangerous place; friend or foe, it was always hard to tell, particularly when you all sat in circle and pointed pistols at each other, with nothing else but a spittoon between all of you.

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Caveat: We have only ever played Bang! digitally.

What's in a game?

• Role cards: ​A hidden role card game has to have hidden role cards! Bang! has 7 of them. A sheriff, deputies, outlaws and a renegade,
• Character cards: Each player takes on the role of one of the characters as well as a hidden role.
  Each character card displays their number of bullets (Hit points.) and has a special ability.
• Playing cards: Used for a variety of purposes in the game, mostly for attacking other players and there are 80 of them.
  They're 2 types of card; brown cards which are once-only and blue cards, which have an ongoing effect.
• Player boards: Player boards have spaces to place, hidden role, character and weapon cards.
• Bullet tokens: These represent hit points.

Bang! utilises a stylised cartoony art style throughout the game cards which is appealing enough and iconography is clear to read.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Hidden Roles: The mix of hidden cards used will depend on the number of participating players, but there's always at least the sheriff, an outlaw and a renegade. Randomly deal each player a hidden role card face-down, the player who gets the sheriff role must reveal their card, everyone else keeps their role secret.
• Characters: Deal each player a character card face-up, players now take the relevant number of bullet tokens for their character, fortunately for the sheriff, they start with an extra bullet!
• Playing cards: Shuffle the playing cards and deal cards out to the players, place the remainder in a face-down deck.

On to play
The main purpose in Bang! is to attack your enemies and aid your allies (If you have any.)! This is is not quite so simple as it sounds though, since it's unlikely that players will know who is an enemies or a friend, at least at the start.
Additionally, you may not even be able to reach you enemies, most attacks in Bang! have a range of 1, this means an attack can only target someone 1 space away, i.e., someone adjacent, there are several weapons have extra range and there're also ways to alter ranges.
A turn in Bang! consists of 3 actions.

• Draw cards: The active player draws 2 cards from the player deck.
• Play cards: The active player may play any number of player cards with the exception of Bang! cards, of which only 1 may be played, Bang! cards are the main form of attacking other players.
  Player cards have various actions from attacks to healing, to stealing cards from other players or forcing them to discard etc. Player cards also provide weapons and gear to players.
  Finally, there are a couple of cards that players can use out-of-turn in reaction to the active player, these are the only cards that can be played out-of-turn.
• Discard: The last action performed by the active player is to discard down to their card limit - which is equal to their bullets/hit points.
  Thus, as a player loses hit points, their hand size shrinks correspondingly, it can be a quite nasty death spiral!

Endgame
In Bang!, play continues until one of three win conditions are met, these win conditions will depend what hidden role players have.
Sheriff/deputies: All outlaws and the renegade must be eliminated for the sheriff/deputies to win.
Outlaws: Eliminate the sheriff and the outlaws win.
​Renegade: Win by being the last man standing.

Overall
​Bang! is a pretty straightforward hidden role game, however, unlike some hidden role games, most of the game's 3 factions will start not knowing who their allies might be, with exception of deputies and the renegade (Who has no allies.).
Players will need to observe other players' behaviour to try and gauge their motives, this is made more difficult because the renegade will be looking help or hinder either of the other factions depending on the situation, adding to this are the range restriction rules that can force players to change behaviour. Additionally, in Bang! actions are card driven, i.e. a player's decisions will be to some degree limited by the cards in their hand; no BANG! card - no attack for example, this can mean even more restrictions on player choices.
We found this made for a slightly unsatisfying experience, particularly since there's a a fairly strict rule on hand size and it becomes a case of use-it-or-lose-it with cards. It didn't help that sometimes it felt like the card play made the game a little futile, managing to play a Bang! card only for your target to immediately heal it made for a negative feeling.

We played Bang! with a lower player count and online; with more players and in-person play I'm sure that it would've been a different experience, a game like Bang! will thrive with more players.

I'm not the biggest fan of hidden role games and I don't think Bang! is a bad game but  I can think of other similar games I'd rather play - including it's later companion game; Bang! The Dice Game.