LogFAQs > #934071732

38. BANG! The Dice Game (2013)

Category: Team vs Team
Genres: Party game, hidden identity, dice-rolling, player combat
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 2
Game length: 20-30 minutes
Experience: 5+ plays (2015-2019) with 6-8 players
Previous ranks: 39/100 (2016), 35/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player is assigned both a character with powers and a role which determines their allegiance: a sheriff (who is revealed), outlaws (who want to kill the sheriff), deputies (who support the sheriff), and a renegade (who wants to be the last man standing). On your turn, you roll and reroll a bunch of dice up to three times. The results generally let you shoot at your immediate neighbors or people one removed from immediate neighbors, or recover health. Oddly, you can also roll arrows, which will hurt you eventually.

Design - BTDG is a dice reimplementation of BANG!, a card game which has some interesting ideas: hidden identities, but the game isn't solely about deducing who is who, but rather about killing your enemies. The problem with BANG! is that it was slow as hell. Dodge cards and healing cards, along with lose-turn cards, basically ensure high variance with a high chance of being eliminated early and watching along.

While BTDG doesn't prevent you from being eliminated early, it has some nice controls on the playtime. Beer is available to heal you or anyone else (ahh, the wild west theming!), but you're twice as likely to roll bullets, and you can also roll arrows instead. As a result, the game is chaotic and violent with how it removes your health. (Amusingly, you can technically be forced to shoot a teammate). One of my personal favorite part about BTDG is how you can effectively be a dead man walking when you roll a bunch of arrows, but until someone rolls the final arrows to cause that HP to be drained, you're actually okay.

Playing BTDG falls just short of thrills. In particular, there is one notably superior hidden-identity-kill-the-opposing-team game. And a big part of that is that the "hidden identity" part of the game is relatively low. In all my games, the outlaws shoot the sheriff and then the deputies make themselves obvious by targeting outlaws themselves. The renegade should fight for Team Sheriff's behalf, but in my experience, the renegade has pretty much always died before getting down to the final few in a dramatic standoff.

Being a dice game, BTDG's outcomes are random. That's fine. It's the dramatic arc that you always want to see but are not guaranteed to get.

Experience - Back in 2015 when every group seemed big, BTDG hit the table a few times. It's not a perfect game, but it filled gaps very nicely. It's a game that has grown in my estimation since then for its compact playtime and nice way of assigning people to teams - always fun to give you an investment in the outcome even if you're eliminated. Along with Magic Maze, BTDG was on sale for under $10 at Barnes and Noble in December. I snagged it and have only gotten it to the table once and found the same high-floor experience I wanted.

Future - I don't play in mid-larger groups too often, but I feel pretty well-equipped for them now with BTDG! I have something of a vested interest in getting it to the table, even though I kind of see its value as being a low-usage type of game.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness