Review of Bang! The Dice Game

Players: 3-8
Playing Time: 15 minutes

Summary of the Components

Bang! The Dice Game comes with five dice, a deck of a few different types of cards, and cardboard arrow and bullet tokens.

Quality: The quality of everything is excellent. The plastic dice are sturdy and feature indented icons; the cards are all quite thick; and the cardboard is thick and linen-textured. 5 out of 5.

Beauty: I was quite impressed with the graphic design of the game. The role cards are colored silhouettes that look very attractive, while the character cards have nice colorful artwork and a good design overall. This is an good-looking game. 5 out of 5.

Usability: The gameplay centers around six icons which appear on the dice. They're color-coded and overall quite easy to read; they're also helpfully repeated on some of the character cards to clarify special abilities. I would have liked to see a bit more iconography on the cards, but it's the dice that really make or break the game, and they're done well. 5- out of 5.

Theming: A sheriff and deputies are fighting outlaws and renegades by shooting guns and drinking beers. There's not a lot of depth to this theming, but it's fun. 4 out of 5.

It's the quality and beauty of this game that really stand out, but overall Bang! The Dice Game is stylistically strong, so I've given it a "5" out of "5" for Style.

Summary of the Gameplay

Each player is given a secret role as a sheriff, deputy, outlaw, or renegade. The sheriff and deputies are trying to kill all the outlaws and renegades, the outlaws are trying to kill the sheriff, and the renegades are trying to kill everyone else.

Setup: Each player take a role card, then the sheriff reveals himself. Afterward each player takes a character card. This provides a simple (but notable) special ability and also tells the player how many life points he starts off with (typically 7-9).

Rolling the Dice: On a turn a player rolls all his dice. Every time he rolls an arrow, he immediately takes an arrow token, and any dynamites that he rolls he must keep. After his first roll, he gets to roll any dice but dynamites again, then he gets to do the same a third time. He now takes the result of his dice.

• Arrows. Each arrow generates an arrow immediately when it's rolled; they have no further effect at the end of a round.
• Dynamite. If a player rolls three dynamite, he immediately takes one point of damage and ends his turn.
• "1" Bull's Eye. The player causes one damage to someone adjacent to him.
• "2" Bull's Eye. The player causes two damage to someone exactly two spaces from him.
• Beer. The player heals someone for one point of damage.
• Gatling Gun. If a player rolls three gatling guns, then everyone else takes one point of damage.

The Indian Attack. There are only 9 arrows in the supply. When they're all allocated, the players each take damage equal to the number of arrows they have, then all the arrows go back into the central supply.

Strategy & Tactics: Much of the game is actually about figuring out who is who. Since only the sheriff role is open, you don't know exactly who is helping you and who is hurting you … except through their actions. The dice game really underscores this dilemma as you must shoot people when you roll the bullseye results.

Ending the Game: Players will slowly be eliminated over the course of the game. When the sheriff is killed or when all the outlaws and renegades are killed, then the game ends with victory going to outlaws, renegades, or the sheriff and deputies, as appropriate.

Relationship to Other Games

Bang! The Dice Game is the dice version of Bang! (The Card Game). It does a surprisingly good job of referencing the main tropes and actions of its card predecessor, while offering it all up in a quick-playing and simplified format.

The Game Design

Generally, I feel like the Dice Game really benefits from its simpler, quicker take on Bang! It's cuts out most of the downtime of the original (centered around fussing with cards and deciding what to play) and instead gets down to the simple actions of deducing roles and shooting enemies.

I believe that any dice game succeeds or fails largely on the basis of whether it's exciting to roll the dice, and here Bang! The Dice Game does a good job. You can get a genuinely good dice role (full of needed beer or with just enough bulls eyes to kill an opponent) or a truly horrible roll (full of dynamites or arrows). Though there's obviously a lot of randomness here, and the shoot-or-heal decision is somewhat simple, there's also some depth in your choices as you decide whether to heal or wound. There's even some pushing of your luck as you decide whether to chance arrows or dynamite by rerolling.

The characters are overall quite well-integrated with this dice rolling: the special powers are meaningful and link well with what the dice do.

Beyond that, Bang! The Dice Game has the core strength of the original Bang! the need to puzzle out who's who and to base your actions on that.

Bang! The Dice Game is light and somewhat simplistic, but it also plays fast and can be exciting and fun. I've thus given it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Bang! The Dice Game may actually be better than the original Bang! card game. It compresses the deduction and action of the original into just 15 minutes or so of exciting play, producing an enjoyable filler game.