How The West Was Fun

I've picked up a lot of party traditions in college and playing Bang! is definitely one of my favorites. Even, or perhaps especially, in this modern climate of electronic gaming, it is one of the best multiplayer investments you can make. Rock Band and Smash Bros. are a helluva lotta fun, but with larger gatherings, the four player limit strains your ability to entertain. Bang! is an excellent backup plan, and in my opinion, an essential addition to any gamer nerd's library of traditional (read: non-electronic) titles.

The game is basically a card driven variation of the game Mafia featuring basic role-playing elements like health, items, character roles and abilities. Each game features three basic factions: The Sheriff and his Vices, who want to purge the town of undesirables, the Outlaws aiming to take over the town by killing the lawmen, and the Renegade who must be the last man standing in order to win. Only the Sheriff's identity is public however, resulting in many cases of mistaken identity and hilarious alliances. In addition to the four different roles that determine players' agendas, each player draws a character card that has a special power, allowing them to draw more cards, or use cards in special ways. The rest of the deck consists of permanent equipment cards (guns and horses) which you lay down in front of you, and instant action cards (shooting, dodging, stealing cards) which you hold in your hand. The game's first expansion, Dodge City, is fairly essential as it introduces the Renegade role and semi-permanent single-use equipment cards. People tend to ignore the second two expansions which introduce condition cards that change the terms of play for one round.

pic taken from RPG.net and found through google
Here's a basic setup to give you an idea of what the game is like. Absent are the semi-permanant equipment cards of Dodge City and the Condition cards of High Noon and Fistful of Cards.

It sounds complicated, and it is, but it's much easier to explain, set-up and learn than something like Catan, or even Monopoly for that matter. Munchkin, another nerd favorite, tends to involve less guile and more negotiation, up until the end game when everybody starts screwing each other over. In Bang! you can run some truly impressive cons and screw people over without intending to, all in one match, sometimes with the same action. Word to the wise: flat out stating your role tends to make the game harder and less fun. By outing yourself as an outlaw, you provide other more cunning outlaws with a sacrificial lamb. All they have to do to look like good guys is shoot you dead. The exception to this rule is to claim to be the vice. No matter what you actually are, you want to look like the vice to the Sheriff. In fact, it's become something of an unspoken rule with my group. "I'm the vice!" "No, I'm the vice!" etc.

I'm not gonna lie here; one of the reasons Bang! is a favorite is that in addition to providing players with an endless stream of awful puns, it makes a 'bang-up' drinking game (see what I mean about the puns?). The most obvious drinking variation is to have players drink whenever their characters do; in game, you recover health by downing beers, tequila and canteens. It's a serviceable rule-set, but rather uninspired and a bit dry for my tastes. I say take a swig of brew whenever somebody hits you or after failing to hit somebody else, and if you're really feeling manly, take a shot of something harder whenever using a recovery item! Disclaimer: This is actually fucking terrible advice. Trust me, I tried it. Shot of sodium rich soy sauce + gulps of dehydrating alcohol = painful hangover. Just stick to tequila. Or Juice.

Pic taken from myfairgames.com ; as usual, found through google

Despite a couple odd tweaks, The Bullet is definitely the edition you want. It has all the expansions, a couple of extra characters with ridiculous but fun powers, a sweet-looking bullet case, and a so-cheesy-it's-awesome Sheriff's Badge.

Some less alcoholic house rules that have proven fun are playing with two character powers at once (though some combinations are prohibited for balance reasons) and The Dual Schofield Rule, which states that a player may equip 2 Schofields and shoot at two different targets once in one turn. Normally, players can only shoot once in a turn, and they can only equip one gun. The rule sprang up after we watched the new 3:10 to Yuma and saw Charlie Prince waste about a hundred people with a pair of Schofields. It's the perfect house rule since it can only be implemented in rare circumstances, and it has a greater impact on style than substance. Other rule changes we use involve using the older versions of certain cards; as mentioned in the picture above, certain features were tweaked slightly in The Bullet edition of the game, including Ragtime being mistakenly misprinted as a "Shoot any player" card instead of a "Steal from any player" card, and a couple of character's lives being adjusted.

All in all, I cannot recommend Bang! highly enough since it's the sort of game almost everybody can enjoy, and at ~ $40 for The Bullet Edition, you'd be hard pressed to find a finer bargain. So git along, giddy up and have a gun fight or few. You won't be disappointed. In closing, some mood music.

The Summer Effect

This last Thursday, one of my best friends came over to my apartment and presented me with a choice: Watch 500 Days of Summer for the first time or watch Zombie Land again. For most guys, this is a no-brainer. Through the twisted magic of monogamy, (with my fiancee, not my friend) we ended up settling on the former. Here's the shocking part: It was the right choice. I don't mean to say it is a better movie than Zombie Land on the whole, such a thing borderlines blasphemy and is difficult to fathom, but it is an excellent enough film that you should see it at least once, regardless of who you are, even when presented with other fine options of entertainment. In fact, I would go so far as to call it the best romance since Love Actually.

It's a damn good movie, but the aesthetic is so Indie it stings at times.

Each scene or couple of scenes are excerpted days from a romance, all shuffled and played out of order in a way that is far more powerful than a traditional telling. Just like love actually interviews numerous different narratives of love together, Summer presents readers with a number of shifting currents at work in the relationship. This cutting allows the movie to tell a much deeper and far more honest love story than Hollywood's Meg Ryan meets Tom Hanks model. It even sets it apart from other Indie boy meets girl stories. Though, before proceeding, it may be prudent to provide a brief explanation of what I mean by indie.

In the beginning, the phrase stood for Independent Music, meaning music that was not published by a major record label. Hipsters, the metric unit of the indie subculture, will claim that said music is independently published because it's too cool or sophisticated for us mere sheeple to appreciate. Translation: not enough people would want to buy the music to motivate a major record label to sell it. That's a broad statement and a crude summary of the politics in play behind the music, but it's a useful enough explanation to help you understand where the greater Indie aesthetic is coming from. Like many counter-cultures it is a rejection of the mainstream, and it's particular interest lies where commercialism and artistic taste intersect, particularly where music is concerned. Like many other counter cultures however, the demographic has been identified (2o something college grads) and the market has been branded, and there is a specific sort of fiction and a specific style of dress associated with the aesthetic. One can consider the indie movement as the baroque movement of the post .com period, and Hipsters celebrate their awkwardness through ironic self-deprecation.

500 Days of Summer is that sort of movie; a celebration of being strange, and of not putting up with consumerism's exploitative bullshit. As such, it can come across as preachy in a roundabout way, but like most things indie, the hipster self-deprecation mutes it's own activism. Psychologists and pop cultural scholars scratching their heads over where a social movement comes into it's own should take a look at Summer just to see how everything conforms to this movement. Everything in the movie from the wardrobe, to the soundtrack, to the little animations that separate each day in the relationship, to the lead Zoey Deschanel's alluring yet awkward good looks is all decidedly 'Indien.'

Pic swiped from Starpulse via Google. Here she just looks pretty. The awkward comes through in the trailer however.

So how does all this awkwardness tie in to the plot? Aside from shuffling the chronology, the story flips the dynamics of boy meeting girl. Tom is the "new" sort of boy, the kind of leading man that would give Hemingway another excuse to drink. He falls for girls hard, talks about his feelings with his friends, and cares about his appearance enough to feel insecure about it. Meanwhile, the titular Summer is an old-fashioned guy. She is non-committal fiercely sexual, and very guarded about her emotions. This gender-reversal is nothing new, but the delivery here is nuanced and authentic to the times we live in.


If you're a person like me, who has come to despise Hollywood's formulaic approach to romance, or a person like either of the movies protagonists, you will love it. Fans of more conventional fair will probably enjoy it too because there is real, legitimate romance happening here. It may even be an sobering experience of sorts. So if you're searching for a movie to watch this valentide, give 500 Days of Summer a shot.