BANG! Community: Forum and Links

One of my goals in the BANG! Blog is to enhance and support the BANG! community. Thus, I have made efforts to provide both modding tools and tutorials to help modders create their own fan expansions. I have been working diligently to translate my projects (like Death Mesa) into other languages. On the blog I have made comments open on almost all posts, and tried to give thorough responses. Eventually, I hope to perhaps organize online games (and perhaps even tournaments) when the BANG! Video Game comes out of multiplayer beta.



BANG! Blog Forum. To further help with community interaction, I have created an online forum. Here, questions can be posted on Death Mesa, Robbers' Roost, BANG! Strategy, BANG! Modding, and suggestions can be given for the site. Miscellaneous topics are posted, ranging from sharing new variants, discussing how to balance characters, exploring production issues, and so forth. I hope this will be a useful resource for you.



Links. While I hope to make the BANG! Blog your #1 BANG! resource, there are other sites on the web that provide valuable files, modding tools and expansions, answers to questions, and so forth, that are worth checking out. Check out the list I compiled below with a descriptions of their assets.

• BANG! on Board Game Geek. This site provides a large amount of resources. This includes technical information about the game, creative images, player aids, a collection of reviews, custom expansions (old), rules translations, links, and video. In the end, however, the great thing about BGG is the forums, and the conversations available there.



• Emiliano Sciarra's Site. Sciarra, BANG!'s designer, recently released a new version of his site. Besides being more aesthetically pleasing, it provides a lot of information about BANG!: technical card by card information, the development and history of the game and its expansions, FAQs, some strategy suggestions, and other information. While a lot of it is translated into English, quite a bit of it is also only in Italian. Nonetheless, it should be a rewarding visit. Sciarra even mentioned the BANG! Blog on his site, noting the strategic analyis of the game I provide here. So I thank him for his notice!



• dV-Giochi. The main publisher and rights holder to BANG!. This site provides some helpful rules and FAQ downloads, BANG! news, and also has some useful forums. There is one dedicated to new card ideas that might be of use to modders. As with the BANG! card game itself, there is a mix of Italian and English here. So use your Google Translate where necessary. Finally, I believe the dV-Giochi site is the only place where you can purchase blank character and playing cards at the moment. Unfortunately, international shipping of the cards is still astronomical.



• Edge Entertainment. The Spanish publisher to BANG!. This slick-looking site provides a few downloads, but it is mostly the very active forums that make this site a great place to visit. Besides getting answers to rules, there are many great and skilled modders at work at Edge Ent.



• BANG! Directors' Cuts. Home of a new Spanish unofficial expansion to BANG! designed by Django. I have been working with him on an English translation. The site explains both the rules to BANG!, and gives a detailed presentation and discussion of the cards added in the custom expansion. Also included are some shots of physically produced copies.



• BANG.cz. Probably the oldest of the BANG! fan sites. It is a Czech-English site, with some impressive offerings, such as creating the original El Dorado expansion. I updated and translated this expansion into English. Martin Blasko, the designer of the Valley of Shadows expansion, operates from this site. Bang.cz offers the BANG! Card Generator, which allows modders to quickly design custom cards. Due to its significant limitations, I depricate its use for the serious modder (try out the BANG! Master Template instead), but it will still be very useful for the casual one because of its speed. Besides this, bang.cz provides some excellent downloads of rules, FAQs, custom expansions, and so forth. It also has some active forums, but these are pretty Czech-exclusive. An English post occurs probably once every month or two. Sadly, Google Translate is far less proficient in Czech.



• BANG! Video Game. Official site of the BANG! cross-platform video game, developed by Palzoun and Spinvector. It provides some news, trailers, faqs and most importantly provides a place to puchase the video game. The multiplayer aspect of the video game is currently in beta testing. For more information on the video game, I recommend checking out the video game's Facebook page, which is far more active.



• BANG! on La Tana dei Goblin. Fan page on an Italian game site. Like Edge Ent and the Bang.cz forums, the comments, reviews, and discussions here are exclusively non-English. There are some useful Italian downloads here, but this site is far less expansive than BGG or bang.cz.



• BANG!/Wanted on Jeux 2 Rody. Game Page page on a French gaming site. Has some useful downloads, rules, and links for the French BANG! player.



• BANG! on Wikipedia. Last, and also least, is the Wikipedia page for BANG!. While the link is for the English page, there are also pages in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Czech. Speaking of the content on the English page, it provides general information on the rules (inc. tournament), cards, characters, and strategy of BANG!. This is followed by a description of official and unofficial expansions to BANG!, and some notes on the BANG! video game.