The world of horseracing has long been associated with cheating in all its forms. But few games ever attempt to simulate that aspect. Players are assigned a horse and must move it around the track by rolling a single die. This would be rather boring if the game didn’t allow for the players to bet on another player’s horse, so the dilemma is whether or not to move your horse badly just to make it easier for the horse you bet on to win. Even that could be boring, but then each player is issued cards that allow them to commit dirty tricks, for instance making a horse fall or forcing the winner to take a drug test. All in all, it makes for some very interesting racing.

BANG! The Dice Game keeps the core of the Bang! card game in place. At the start of the game, players each take a role card that secretly places them on a team: the Sheriff and deputies, outlaws, and renegades. The Sheriff and deputies need to kill the outlaws, the outlaws win by killing the Sheriff, and the renegades want to be the last players alive in the game.

Each player also receives a character card which grants him a special power in the game. The Sheriff reveals his role card and takes the first turn of the game. On a turn, a player can roll the five dice up to three times, using the results of the dice to shoot neighboring players, increase the range of his shots, heal his (or anyone else’s) life points, or put him in range of the Indians, which are represented by nine tokens in the center of the table. Each time a player rolls an arrow, he takes one of these tokens; when the final token is taken, each player loses one life point for each token he holds, then the tokens are returned to the center of the table.

If a player collects a trio of Gatling symbols on the dice, he fires one shot at everyone else and rids himself of Indian tokens. Who’ll get his shot off first? Play continues until one team meets its winning condition – and death won’t necessarily keep you from winning as long as your teammates pull through!