Tuesday, August 23, 2011

A Fistful of Cards: Designer's Notes

A Fistful of Cards BANG! Prototype

This is the next in a series of articles on the development of BANG!. The expansion "A Fistful of Cards" was developed in response to both the success of the High Noon expansion and a desire to put something special together for the 2005 edition of BANG!. DaVinci games and its international partners decided to include the BANG! community on this one, soliciting proposals for new event cards in the vein of High Noon. After over 500 proposals came in, it was up to Emiliano Sciarra (the designer of BANG!) to pick which event cards were to be a part of the expansion. He was supposed to pick at least 1 card from each country where one of DaVinci's international business partners resided.

Sciarra recalled that the process of finishing A Fistful of Cards on time was laborious. The selection process was fun. While some cards, such as Ambush, were submitted multiple times, others such as Dead Man or Vendetta quite surprised him. However, testing and writing careful text for each of the event cards (so as to avoid loopholes) was quite difficult. Sciarra believed the expansion had overall a mixed result: some cards were fun, brutal, and others unbalanced. The last card in particular was brutal, but provided the internal clock for BANG! that Sciarra had wanted.

For the full article (Italian only), visit the article at Sciarra's homepage.

No comments:

Post a Comment