Bang! The Dice Game Review

Welcome to John Gets Games. Today I'm going to talk about Bang the Dice game. This is a light push your luck game with some hidden roll mechanics. First, I'll tell you how to play the game and then I'll tell you what I think. All right, so how do we play Bang the Dice game? The first thing to note is that this is a hidden roll game.

There are four different role types. All these cards will get shuffled up and dealt out to the players at the beginning of the game who will play differently based off of the roles because they have different victory conditions. The sheriff and the deputies will win collectively if at the end of the game all renegades and outlaws are dead.

The renegades will win by themselves if at the end of the game everyone else is dead. Uh so a renegade might have to kill another renegade in order to win. And the outlaws win collectively if at the end of the game the sheriff is dead and as long as there is not one character left who happens to be a renegade cuz in that case the renegade will be the winner.

In an eight-player game you'll use all these roles. With less players according to the rule book you'll take specific roles out. The sheriff starts the game with two extra health, which is denoted by bullets over here. And the sheriff player will actually reveal that they are the sheriff at the beginning of the game.

Uh while all other players will keep their roles face down, so everyone knows who the sheriff is, but all the other roles are a mystery at the beginning. All right, let's look at the dice. We have five different dice in this game. They're all identical, and there are six different icon types. Each die has one of each of these icon types on them.

We have dynamite, arrows, a one rage bang, a two- range bang, gatling gun, and beer. On your turn, you're going to be rolling the dice up to three times, and you can uh choose to not roll specific dice and roll others and pull some of those back. And based off of the icons, they do different things.

So, let's go over them. The dynamite, if you ever roll any dynamite, you are forced to lock it out. It's not going to actually do anything good for you. It just you can't keep rolling that die for the rest of your turn. If you ever happen to roll three dynamite, then your turn ends right then. You're going to take one damage.

So, you're gonna like lose a damage from your character and put them over here, and you'll get to evaluate the rest of your dice. But three damage means uh three dynamites means your turn is over. Every time an arrow is rolled, you're going to draw an arrow from the arrow stack and put it next to your character down here.

This isn't bad right now, but it will be bad later. This actually includes rolling arrows in the middle of your turn. You can reroll an arrow and if you get another arrow, you're going to have to draw another arrow token. Arrow tokens don't do anything until the last arrow token is drawn from the stack, at which point every person takes all of their arrows, puts them back in the stack, and takes one damage uh per arrow that they have to put back.

So, it's damage that's coming to you later. The one range bang uh will do one damage to the person immediately to your left or to your right. And the two-range bang will do one damage immediately to the person two to your left and two to your right. You can split these up however you like. The gatling gun only works if you have at least three of the symbol shown up on your die.

So three dice with the gatling gun symbol. At this point, you can do one damage to every single opponent. And you also get the bonus of taking all arrows that are in front of you and discarding them back to the pile without taking any damage. So that's really quite nice. The last icon is the mug of beer.

For each mug of beer, you can heal one damage from somebody. You can heal it from yourself or from someone else, but you're never able you're never able to go over your maximum amount of health. Uh so I'm going to do a quick little demonstration hand to show how this actually works. So you roll the dice out and well, isn't this funny?

Uh in this case, I would actually immediately have my turn end. I've rolled three dynamite. I will lose one life from over here. I will take an arrow from the bank and then I could heal up one damage. In this case, I would probably heal up that one damage that I just taken. I put it back over here on my character.

Uh, let's do another fake hand. One that might last a little bit longer. We roll this out. And it's a little closer. We've got two dynamite. So, I'm a little close. They're both locked over here. And now I have this other options here. Uh, at this point, I might just want to end my turn anyway because I'm afraid of rolling another dynamite.

But if I and if I did that, I would heal once and be able to do two damage to someone either two to I'm sorry, one damage to one person two to my left or two to my right. This gatling does nothing for me. Let's pretend like I'm pushing my luck a little bit cuz this is a pusher game. And I roll again.

All right, at this point I rolled the same icon again. And now I've got an arrow. So I take an arrow from the bank and I put it in front of my character. And I'm like, well, I can roll one more time. You can roll three times. You know, what are the odds I get another arrow? Uh, at this point I kind of want to heal.

So maybe he'll roll again and wow, super explode. So in this case I would lose a life and my turn is over. But oh, I still get to heal one life back. So that's kind of how turns go. You know, you you have a certain die values that kind of force some things on you and other ones that give you some semblance of control.

All right. So I'd also like to talk about these character cards that we have over here. At the beginning of the game, each player is going to get one of these randomly, and they tell everyone two things. You put them face up in front of you. They tell you the amount of health that you have for the game, and you can never going to go over that.

So, this guy right here has nine health. And down here, we have one ability that's going to affect that character for the rest of the game. In this instance, uh this character right here will never take damage from opponent's Gatling guns. This guy up here can roll dynamite, and this guy up here can get an extra roll.

of four times. There are 16 different characters in the game. So, a relatively good variety. Some of them are more situational than others. So, players keep taking turns, doing damage, healing, and relatively soon we're going to start to find that players are starting to die. You die when you lose your last bullet.

You go down to zero health. At that point, you are knocked out of the game, but you have not necessarily lost the game. And once a certain type of people have died, there are two different cases, then the game's going to end. The first situation is if the sheriff ever dies, then the game ends. The second situation is if all the outlaws and renegades are dead, then the game ends.

In both of these cases, the game is over and you go off of what I mentioned earlier in the video to figure out who won. And then everyone from that respective group, obviously, minus the renegades, who always win by themselves, will win. So, you can win if you are dead. You could be a deputy who was killed on the very first turn of the game, but if all the renegades and outlaws are dead at the end of the game, you still win.

You might never even roll the dice. Uh, another goofy thing is that the sheriff might have killed a deputy because the sheriff might have thought that deputy was an outlaw. So, since this is a hidden rolls game, you are trying to figure out who everyone else is, minus the sheriff, of course, and the sheriff is really trying to figure out who the heck their uh their deputies are.

And this allows a little bit of deception and deduction to come into play. For instance, you know, uh an outlaw might use a beer to heal the sheriff early game trying to make the sheriff think that they are actually a deputy. And in that case, maybe the sheriff then shoots someone who actually is a deputy thinking they're an outlaw because they thought this person was a deputy.

That kind of stuff. You you try to deduce based off of how people use these dice. also how they reroll, you know, what dice they keep and what dice they don't keep could definitely be telling as to what their plans really are. And uh that's definitely one aspect of the game. All right, at this point I'm going to jump over and tell you what I think about the game.

Normally in my reviews, I start with the things I like, go to the things that might be problems, then end with issues I have with the game. I'm going to do it a little differently for Bang the Dice game. Uh, I'm going to go through some different mechanics and basically explain why I don't think they worked out very well for this game and why this game didn't end up working well for my group.

Uh, the first thing that I wanted to mention is the uh the individual player powers. You know, I love individual player powers. The uh the idea of having something that no one else does for the whole game is really cool. Unfortunately, several of them uh for instance, this guy down here, which I showed before, they're just kind of lame.

you know, never losing life points to the gatling gun. Well, I have no control over whether or not someone else shoots me with a gatling gun. Happens on someone else's turn, and it doesn't happen that often anyway. So, this guy's power almost never really happens. Sure, he's got an extra life point, but at the end of the day, that's not like an interesting thing you get to do.

Some of them are really cool. I showed this guy as well who gets to reroll dynamite, and that's a big, you know, breaking the rules kind of thing that that's fun. But, I don't know, it just seemed like some of them were really lame, and some of them were really cool. they were not balanced for coolness very well.

Uh we ended up dealing out two cards to everybody and letting people choose and you know lo and behold cards like this guy just never got picked which is kind of unfortunate and it sort of makes that 16 characters feel like a lot less when you actually look at the ones that you want to play. Uh going into the actual how the game plays.

Uh the big issue that I have with this game is that it's too short. I know that sounds kind of crazy. You know, the idea of Bang the Dice game is that it's a shorter version of the card game and the card game can drag on really long. I've played the card game many times and uh that's why I was really interested to play this game, why I bought it, because I wanted a shorter shorter bang game that also had the uh the interesting decisions that you might have had in the prior one.

Unfortunately, this one just overshoots the mark in my opinion and becomes too short to the point where any potential meaningful decisions are kind of erased by the fact that the game is over before it begins. Uh, you know, we we've had uh in my going over the rules, you saw I just I rolled the dice and I got three dynamite and that was kind of just the end of my turn.

And I didn't plan for that to happen when I was doing the rules, but that kind of thing happens, you know, maybe not all the time, but often enough to be pretty underwhelming, especially for the people who rolled that. I mean, you might roll it and everyone around the table goes, "Haha." But, uh, once that happens the third time in a game or or the third time in in a couple plays because these games are so quick, I don't know.

it just it just loses that appeal and just more feels like I don't know you you lost a turn because of the luck of the die. You didn't even push your luck into it. It was your first roll and boom, you don't have your turn. And uh I think that's a combination of problems. One, there's just there's almost too much offense and not enough defense.

And also, I think that the life points are too low um to really to really get something going. you know, the the idea of having hidden roles is that you're trying to deduce who is what and who is lying and all that kind of stuff, but we've we've had games where uh people die, you know, they take one turn.

We had one game where where a guy never took a single turn. You know, he got hit for like four points of damage from bang dice from previous turns and then he rolled four arrows that maxed out the supply and boom, he was dead. He never even he never got to evaluate the dice. And you know, the game only lasts 15 to 20 minutes, so I guess he wasn't sitting around sitting around for very long, but it it was still it was it was uninteresting for him.

And over time, it just seemed like things got uninteresting for everyone as we played this game. Uh, and that really is because just damage is flying all over the place. And you're just you're dying so fast. If you don't die in your second turn, I'm pretty much guaranteed you're down to one or two health.

And at that point, you're not thinking about the interesting ideas of r-rolling these kind of things and oh, who is what? You're just like, how do I survive? Do I try and reroll for more beer? Well, you know, beer is only one side of these six. And two out of the six sides on this. So, you know, onethird of the potential outcomes are really bad for you.

You know, the the dynamite, okay, it doesn't hurt you until you get three of them, but it's a dead turn. And then these arrows, you know, they they really stack up. And I get the idea of the mechanic for the arrows. I like the idea behind it that, you know, it's a disincentive to keep rolling. You know, maybe your turn is good enough because if you roll again, you might get some more arrows and that would be okay if you had more life.

It just seems like you have so little life that you kind of can't roll as often as you want to. You know, the people who push their luck always seem to fail. And you know, pushing your luck is fine, but you want the average outcome of pushing your luck to be fun, to be interesting. And it seemed like rarely there was like a whoa turn.

The average turn was kind of dull and then every now and then there was just complete null turns which kind of left everyone cold. Uh, so I really like the idea of the arrows, but it just too much penalization going on. And then, you know, we have, you know, two-thirds of the dice doing damage to everyone else, which, you know, I also understand from a design aesthetic, you know, maybe bang of the card game didn't do enough damage.

It was too hard to get bang cards going. In this one, it seems it's just once again on the opposite side. You know, you're kind of you're just throwing damage all over the place. You're you're hurting yourself. You rolled arrows on yourself and you're throwing damage right and left. And, you know, you don't have enough time before people die and the game is over to really figure out who is what.

You know, the idea is, oh, you're contemplating how are they re-rolling? Oh, how do they give, you know, the healing die to who and what and, you know, trying to get into their head and see who's lying and who is which. And that that just never actually happens. Unfortunately, what usually seemed to happen is just everyone just played selfishly.

like no one was even like going for teams anymore trying to figure out who was on their team cuz they were so close to dead so fast that they just it was all about self-preservation cuz they just that was the best way to hypothetically win in that that setting which is really unfortunate I feel um you know I've thought about maybe playing the game where I double the hit points of the people and maybe I will get to that at some point unfortunately at this point my entire game group has played this and my entire game group has been underwhelmed and it's actually going to become a hard cell to even try and play a variant where we have more health to try and actually get some of the promised mechanics that are in the game to actually show themselves uh which they just haven't uh for our games.

You know, I've I've only played the game a couple times, but some of this uh perspective is coming from some of my friends who played my version of the game when I wasn't there. Uh and they they all just always had the same thing. you know, I I haven't talked to a single person who has played my copy of the game with or without me who enjoyed it, which um you know, at the end of the day, there really is not much getting around that for my group.

So, it it has fallen really flat for us. Uh I kind of wanted to provide a counterpoint to the glowing reviews that I've seen on the internet for this game. I'm not saying that those reviewers were incorrect. I'm just saying, you know, this game does actually kind of appear flawed for us. It did not provide what we were hoping it would and uh yeah, I'm pretty bummed about it.

But anyway, I hope that you enjoyed my review. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.