I bang you at DL 4/3/06

I got lost on the way there. Yes, I know I've been there a kajillion times since I moved here, but thats my story and I'm sticking to it. So by the time I got there, there were about 10 people ready to play board games. We split into a Duel of Ages group (myself, Ben, Ted, Chad and Jeff) and a Railroad Tycoon group. Before we got into DoA, I watched the setup and the start of the rules explanations for RR Tycoon. It looked like Age of Steam with better bits so I'm ready to give it a shot whenever.

I had high hopes for DoA after reading a few reviews this afternoon. I was somewhat disappointed to be honest. The color coding for relative strengths actually served to make things more confusing than necessary at least to me. I think numerical ratings for stats would be much more useful as all the calculations for squeak numbers could be made instantly without consulting a color coded chart (I'm a 5 against a 3? Then I need 9 to squeak). I thought the fiddliness of having to consult the chart every time we needed to check anything took much more time than should be necessary and with the end condition being a time limit really detracts from the game as well.

Ok, well there were positives. There is alot of flavor. There is a deck of what looked to be about 100 character cards available so there is going to be alot of replayability. The characters themselves have abilities that fall in line with their personality. So Brad "the slacker" either does a half assed job (squeaks by) or doesn't do jack squiggly (fails miserably). He also moves like a tortoise unless he is threatened by the proximity of an opponent at which moment he moves like a jackrabbit. He was actually very good for us until he didn't squeak by on a roll at which point he was banished to the far end of the board nowhere near an opponent and became as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Our imposed time limit was 2 hours and we started off well enough. Our team (Ben, Ted and myself) held Brad in reserve at the beginning to allow more opponents to be placed on the board to help embellish his movement ability. We started going to explore the caves and we took a relatively commanding lead in the modern cave while the evil team took a commanding lead in the ancient cave.

Meanwhile Chad had a nasty surprise for us. One of his characters was the mole. At the end of every turn we had to take a quiz about his character and ... well a little different than that but he was highly annoying. I made it my secret motivation that the mole should die a horrible death but unfortunately we weren't allowed to do anything to him until he did something extroardinarily mole-like. Stealing our equipment was not enough to tip off our team of brain surgeons that something was amiss but when he tried to blow up our base some alarm bells started ringing in our heads. Finally, he had lost his totally unjustified diplomatic immunity and with time running out we gang-banged him into submission. It turned out to be an important gang bang since our mecha-armadillo got himself subdued by the horse lady with her zelda bombs. That would have left us tied in the characters department and lost us a victory point. (We ended up tieing in the gameso it was actually critical)

Ok, so it wasn't that terrible, and there was certainly some humor to be found within some of the things that happened. I suspect that after multiple playings the color coding becomes second hand like arithmetic and people will be able to say oh I'm purple against yellow thats a 5 to squeak. Still, why should there be this memory sub game required to speed up the game?

I definitely enjoyed the experience though and would be 100% willing to play again.

After that some people started talking about leaving, but the prospect of a quick Bang session convinced them to stick around. We played 7 handed: Chad was the Sheriff with as luck would have it Dennis and I his loyal deputies flanking him. Jon was the evil Renegade and Ted, Rob and Jeff were the outlaws.

The good guys got off to a great start. I managed to pick on Ted right away more because he was right next to me and Chad was on my other side than some stroke of genius. I also put out a dynamite since it would be unlikely to hit the Sheriff and if I survived would probably provide a positive result for our team. The real positive result of this was that Dennis, who had somehow drawn 3 Jails, managed to nail two of the three outlaws on the first turn and the Renegade Jon who had decided to avoid confrontation with the outlaws by pretending to be one of them. Things actually went relatively slowly, but the good guys kept getting the breaks: the dynamite blew up in Robs face and over the course of a couple of turns I picked up quite a few bangs which gave me the ability to launch a massive attack on Ted when he turned out to be evil. In the endgame it was us against Jeff and we had him in a partial lock with a recurring Jail k-k-k-k-killer combo. A ghost town roll by Chad gave him a glimmer of hope, but a timely saloon kept me alive to re-Jail him on my turn and reinstitute the beat down. He died shortly thereafter at the hands of our heroic sheriff.

I mentioned this before, and even though there was almost perfect information in this instance of Bang, I like the hidden role mechanic alot. Plus Bang has a pretty big humor factor built in automatically. Hmm, so my goal was to keep it short this week...and have more pictures. It seems like I did alright by that. And some people thought that "I bang you" may have a place among our taglines.