A Fistful of Cards: Designer's Notes

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.

High Noon: Designer's Notes

This post follows up on posts I have done on the history and design of Dodge City and BANG!. Today, I will be covering Sciarra's account of how he designed his High Noon expansion. Frequent bloggers will remember how much I hate the event card expansions to BANG!, but reading Sciarra's account of his restrictions on making an expansion softens my criticism. DaVinci games asked Sciarra to design a light expansion for BANG!, which could have "no more than 32 cards, no new characters, few new symbols, and, if possible, no text on the cards. Moreover, the expansion cards could not be shuffled together with the old ones." With these restrictions, it is no surprise that Sciarra had to develop a superstructure to the existing game mechanics for the new cards.

Sciarra toyed around with exploiting the poker symbols on the cards, but this movement slowed down the game. It is interesting to note that Death Mesa, which originally utilized card values and suits intensely, shifted to using just the colors of the suits due to the same problem. Another clever idea Sciarra came up with (captured in the image of the handwritten note above) was to have 24 different cards which corresponded to the hours of the day. While Sciarra doesn't state this, it would have been neat to have event cards that remained for the whole hour it corresponded with, and only shifted in real time. Thus, when you played BANG! could drastically affect rules. Of course, the cards would have to have been different than those which actually came out in High Noon. Eventually, Sciarra narrowed down the cards to 12, and gave each a distinct global effect. To make these cards more varied, he made them all with written text.

The cards had different inspirations, some from friends' suggestions. Sciarra noted how the High Noon card itself (the one having each player lose 1 life point at the beginning of his turn) was derived from the "Armageddon Clock Rule" utilized in Magic tournaments to stop lengthy matches. With the 12 best cards nailed down, 3000 prints were made of the small expansion, and it was sold for 2-3 euros! Sciarra noted how it was often given away free at conventions to anyone who bought BANG!. It was amazingly successful, selling out soon after, and sought obsessively for until reintroduced in The Bullet. High Noon cards received a new border in the Bullet edition.
Read the full article on the design of High Noon.

Found this article interesting? Read the history of the development of BANG!, Dodge City, and A Fistful of Cards.

Dodge City: Designer's Notes

Emiliano Sciarra has provided some commentary on the development of his excellent Dodge City expansion to BANG! He noted that he recognized BANG!'s great ability to include expansions even in the prototype stages of his game. Many of his friends suggested original cards and characters, and the prototype deck became quite large. Many of these cards were cut out of the published version of BANG! to keep deck size smaller, but several were reintroduced into or modified for Dodge City. Sciarra was particularly happy to reintroduce characters like Apache Kid, although he admitted that many fun characters were cut out due to balancing issues and available text space on the cards. This probably included many of the "Boot Hill" characters below.



When it came to the playing cards, Sciarra wanted to introduce many cards with unique effects. The publisher, however, wanted to stick with the original game symbols as much as possible and not have many references to the manual, and so many of these ideas were tossed aside. Eventually, they settled the matter by adding 1 new game mechanic (the green cards) and 1 fresh symbol ( the discard a card to play this card symbol). Sciarra was sad to not include the "Buntline Special," a weapon with range 1 which requires two Missed! cards to avoid its shot. Ironically, something like the Buntline Special appears in the form of the James Dougall in the Robbers' Roost expansion.

Dodge City also expanded the max amount of players to 8, something Sciarra had planned for BANG! from the beginning. Having a second Renegade was decided through playtesting. The 3-player rules were designed by Silvano Sorrentino, and Sciarra believes they are a good compromise given the sacrifice of the hidden roles.

Read the full article on the design of Dodge City.

Found this article interesting? Read the history of the development of BANG!, High Noon, and A Fistful of Cards.

History of BANG!

Edit (8/10/11): Added some information from Sciarra's designer's notes.

Emiliano Sciarra, the designer of BANG!, has started publishing online an account of the development of his famous western card game. So far, it is a pretty good read. Currently, the account (there may be multiple parts to the story, maybe not) explains how in the late 90's, Sciarra shifted from working on video games to board games, pretty much out of the blue. Despite lacking a background in board game design, he worked obsessively on such projects. In fact, in one month in 1999, he created the basis for over 20 board games!

One of his projects was to create a fast, fun, and replayable board game that could be enjoyed by a large group of players (7+), especially families. He adopted a western theme for this game because it was well known and liked (undoubtedly in Italy: the home of spaghetti westerns), and made it easy to role play as famous western characters. Originally, there were no unique roles; everyone was an Outlaw fending for himself, trying to get the greatest "rewards." This, however, felt stagnant, and so he introduced the concept of distance and the different roles. While he now wanted to have teams of outlaws and lawmen duking it out, one challenge to this shootout team game was achieving balance with an odd number of players. He introduced the idea of the Renegade to address this problem. Sciarra appears to have only worked for around two weeks on BANG! before finishing a prototype. He introduced it first to his family in January 6, 2000, and soon after to his chess club. In both places it was a hit, so much so that he was encouraged to search for a publisher. His chess club friends recommended the name "BANG!" for the game, and it stuck.


It was rejected by a U. S. game agency, but accepted by the newly established daVinci (now dV Giochi) and put at the top of their schedule for release. Sciarra explained how his work with daVinci games changed or added elements to BANG!:

• The Renegade was originally only used in odd numbered games. However, since DaVinci thought it was the most interesting role, the Renegade was included in every game instead, which gave the game uncertainty in 4/6/8 player games [such as replacing a Deputy in 4/6 player and an Outlaw in 8].


• During phase 1, 2 cards are drawn instead of 1.


• Backs of character cards were changed to track life points.


• Cards were used to make the "draw!", instead of with a coin or 8-sided die.


• Limit the deck to 110 cards, besides one-of-a-kind cards and the characters.


• Replace the text on cards with symbols.


• Several character abilities were reworked (look at the changes done to the characters shown above).

All these changes worked out well, except the symbols, which have been criticized. He noted how later editions involve the text reappearing on the cards in part. Regardless, with these changes in place the first run of BANG! included 2400 copies, which were anticipated to sell over the next 3 years. Instead, the game sold out in 3 months! That concludes the first part of Sciarra's account.

Read the full article on the development of BANG!. Some content in this article was also adapted from Sciarra's designer's notes for BANG!.

Found this article interesting? Read the history of the development of Dodge City, High Noon, and A Fistful of Cards.