This article is about the Bang! card game. For more uses of the word Bang, please see Bang (disambiguation).

Bang! is a wild west-themed card game designed by Emiliano Sciarra and released by Mayfair Games. In 2004, Bang! won the Origins Award for Best Traditional Card Game of 2003 and Best Graphic Design of a Card Game.

Overview

The game is played by four to seven players (two to eight players with variants and expansions). Each player takes one of the following roles:

• Sheriff (x1)
• Deputy Sheriff (x2)
• Outlaw (x3)
• Renegade (x1)

Each player also receives a unique character card with special abilities and a certain amount of 'bullets' (i.e. life-points).

The object of the game is different for every role:

• the Outlaws must kill the Sheriff;
• the Sheriff and his Deputies must kill the Outlaws and the Renegade(s);
• each Renegade's objective is to be the last character in play. The Renegade(s) must also kill the sheriff last and also all other renegades.

Set Up

Each player is dealt a Character card and a Role card.

The Sheriff announces his role and the other players' roles remain secret. All players reveal their character cards.

The character cards determine the number of 'bullets' each player has; each player reveals her assigned number of bullets on the back of an unused character card. The player given the Sheriff role starts with one additional bullet.

Each player is dealt a number of cards equal to the number of bullets he has.

Each player is considered to be at distance 1 from the players sitting next to him on either side, distance 2 from those sitting one seat further away, and so on (counting the shortest route).

Gameplay

Rules

To shoot at another character, a player must play a card bearing a "Bang!" icon to a player within shooting range.

This means that if the shooter hasn't got any weapons, he can only shoot players at distance 1; if he has a weapon that can fire to distance 3, he can target any player at distance 3 or less.

If the targeted player has a "Missed" card, he can play it to avoid getting shot; otherwise he loses one bullet.

When a character loses his last bullet, he is "dead."

A Beer card can be used to restore a bullet. A player cannot use Beer cards to exceed his character's number of bullets. A player can only rstore his own bullets via a Beer card, and he can only play it during his turn

Exception: if a player loses his last bullet, he can immediately play one or more Beer cards until he gets at 1 bullet

A player may usually play only one "Bang!" card during his turn, but other cards can be played without restriction during the turn

For example,some cards allow to steal cards from an opponent's hand, to force an opponent to discard a card, to jail a character, to change the relative range to other players, to change the range at which the player can shoot. Most of the cards are self-explaining, bearing on themselves little symbols that describe the card's effect when combined; ther rest carry a symbold that suggest to consult the game manual.

At the end of his own turn, a player can have no more cards than his current number of bullets. He must discard cards to meet this requirement.

Play continues clockwise, with each player drawing two cards at the beginning of the turn, until the Sheriff is killed or until all the Outlaws and all the Renegades have been killed.

If the Sheriff kills a deputy he immediately loses his entire hand of cards, and all the cards played in front of him.

For this and the subsequent rule, "kills" means "plays a card that kills the player", not just "shoots".

If anyone kills an Outlaw, he immediately draws 3 cards as a "bounty".

Strategy

The Sheriff should only shoot at known enemies. If the Outlaws are unknown, though, the Sheriff can remain safe by making sure not to kill anyone directly.

The Outlaws don't usually have much interest in hiding: they generally start shooting at the Sheriff as soon as they can, in order to avoid shooting one another and to gang up against the law. Sometimes an Outlaw might want to hide his identity and prepare for a surprise attack in order to make the Sheriff's play more difficult. However, there is no formal allegiance amongst outlaws, and it is sometimes favorable for the team for one outlaw to murder another fledgling for the bounty in order to enable killing the Sheriff.

The Deputies should start shooting at the Outlaws as soon as they reveal themselves.

The Renegade should act two-faced: he should defend the Sheriff at first, and then try to kill the Deputies and, finally, the Sheriff. Thus the Renegade should disguise himself as a Deputy as long as he can in order to avoid being shot at by the law.

Determining the winner

Once the Sheriff is killed, the game is over. If the only player left is a Renegade and is alive at this point, the Renegade wins. However, if two or more players are still alive or the only remaining player is an Outlaw, all the Outlaws win, dead or alive.

On the other hand, if all Outlaws and Renegades are dead before the Sheriff dies, the Sheriff and all the Deputies win, dead or alive.

Official tournament score

An official scoring system can be found on daVinci web site, the official web site of the italian editors of Bang!. The scoring rules are as follows:

• if the Law wins:

The Sheriff wins 1500$ for every Outlaw;

The Deputies win 1000$ for every Outlaw if they survived, and 700$ if they died;

The Renegade wins 400$ for every player if he is the last to be killed .

• if the Outlaws win:

the Renegade, if he is still alive at the end of the game, wins 300$ for each player in the game;

the Outlaws, if they are alive, win 1000$ for each Outlaw in the game, dead or alive; otherwise they win 700$ for each Outlaw in the game.

• if the Renegade wins:

the Sheriff wins 100$ for each player in the game

the Renegade wins 1500$ for each player in the game

• Extra Penalty: if a deputy kills a Sheriff, he loses 5000$

Character inspirations

Some of the characters of Bang! are named after famous people. Here are some examples:

• Willy the Kid = Billy the Kid
• Jesse Jones = Jesse James
• Belle Star = Belle Starr
• Bart Cassidy = Butch Cassidy
• Calamity Janet = Calamity Jane
• Apache Kid = Sundance Kid or The Cisco Kid
• Doc Holyday = Doc Holliday
• Kit Carlson = Kit Carson
• Lucky Duke = Lucky Luke (not real person)

Expansions

• High Noon (2003): a set of thirteen scenario cards that are given to the Sheriff, and revealed at the start of each of his turns - the card's scenario is effective until the next scenario card has been revealed. Scenario cards can cause a player to lose his character's special abilities, disallow the use of certain cards, or even return a dead player to play.
• Dodge City (2004): a set of fifteen new characters and 40 new play cards. A second Renegade is also introduced, allowing eight people to play.
• A Fistful Of Cards (2005): a set of fifteen new scenario cards, which can be mixed with the High Noon expansion.
• Face Off (2005): more a spin-off than an expansion, Face Off is a board game for two players designed to be played with a deck of Bang! cards.
• Eldorado (2006): first unofficial expansion, available here.

In 2007, DeLuxe version with all the expansions will be introduced. [1]

See also

• Game theory

External links

• Mayfair Games' Bang! homepage
• Bang! at BoardGameGeek
• Bang! fanpage

Bang or bangs may refer to:

• A loud noise, like an explosion or a drumbeat
• Bang (Korean) (pronounced 'bahng'), an amusement room for computer games, drinking, or other entertainment in Korean
• Bangs, an American English term for hair that is cut short around the forehead (a 'fringe' in British English)
• Big Bang is a physics theory explaining the beginning of the universe
• Bang, a Desperate Housewives episode
• Bang!, a wild west-themed card game (Origins Award-winning card game of 2003)
• Bang! Howdy, an online strategy game
• !BANG!, a professional wrestling promotion
• Bang!, a Belgian comic by Marc Legendre
• Bang!, a popular series of humorous NFL cartoons
• 'Bangs', or brucellosis, a bacterial disease (a corruption of the alternate name 'Bang's disease')
• Bhang, a cannabis derivative from the Indian subcontinent
• Slang for exclamation mark
• A fringe of hair cut across the forehead (USA usage). (British: "fringe")
• An e-mail address with an ! is called a bang path.
• See BANG file

In music

• Bang! (Rutter), an opera by John Rutter
• Bangs (band), an American punk rock band
• Bang (band), an early 1970s hard rock group
• Bang!, the Happy Hardcore group
• Bang (album), an album by The James Gang, released in 1973
• Bang! (album), the title of two different compilation albums by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
• Bang (Jesus Lizard album), a compilation album by the Jesus Lizard issued in 2000 by Touch and Go Records
• Bang!, the title of a World Party album
• "Bang (song)", a single by the band Blur
• "Bangs (song)", a song by They Might Be Giants
• Bang, the offbeat figure typical of reggae songs and played on guitar and piano (see also: checka and skank)
• "Bang!" is a single released by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• Bang Records, a record label
• to hit a drum

People

• Lester Bangs, American music journalist.
• John Kendrick Bangs, 19th-century writer.
• Outram Bangs (1863–1932), American zoologist.
• Molly Bang (1943-) American illustrator.
• An uncommon Korean family name:
  • Bang Seong Joon, South Korean voice actor
  • Bang Young-ung (b. 1942), South Korean novelist

As shorthand or slang

• the act of sexual intercourse
• an exclamation mark, in printer and computer jargon
• a factorial, in mathematics, because the factorial of n is often written as n!
• an explosive product, in mining ('load the bang into the hole')
• an abrupt left turn, in Boston slang (the opposite of this, an abrupt right turn, is a hang);
• the state of being sexually attractive ('she is banging!'), especially in British slang
• In Britain, "bang goes X" is slang for "that's put an end to X".

• bangs: brucellosis (a bacterial disease) (from its alternate name "Bang's disease")

See also

• Boom

!Bang! is a professional wrestling promotion owned by Dory Funk, Jr. It is run by the Funking Conservatory - a full-service professional wrestling school - with the stars of !BANG! being members of the Funking Conservatory team. They offer a program to get people in the ring and on television, with a three-step / three-week schedule for aspiring wrestlers of all skill levels, with the chance of working in front of a live crowd and even becoming a star on the !Bang! TV show. As well as training wrestlers, the Funking Conservatory team also offer courses in the promotion of professional wrestling, refereeing, announcing and creative writing for professional wrestling.

Wrestlers that have been trained by Dory Funk, Jr. include Chris Sabin, Christian Cage, Jun Akiyama, Kurt Angle, Lita, Matt Hardy, Paul London, Rhino, Steve Corino, William Regal, and many others. Funk previously worked as head coach of the Funking Dojo wrestling training camp for WWF in Stamford, Connecticut during the 1990s. Current pro-wrestlers and past graduates often attend the Funking Conservatory, giving advice to new students - with guests including Rob Van Dam and Bobby Heenan.