Designer's Notes High Noon
When daVinci asked me to make a promotional, “light” expansion for BANG!, they gave me several exacting requirements to meet: 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. A true challenge, since these limitations prevented me to develop the game along its most natural directions –– additional game cards and characters. According to that, it was natural to think that a superstructure to the existing game mechanics was needed: that is, special cards with strange effects.
One of the first ideas, not entirely dropped yet, was to take advantage of the poker symbols on the cards: this would give a strategic added value to each card. Unfortunately, playtesting reports revealed that this kind of relationship really slowed the game (a BANG! of Diamonds was very different from a BANG! of Spades!): eventually, it was said that it is too early for an expansion suited only for the real experts of the game, who play at a supersonic speed. Bearing this in mind, I returned on an old note for this expansion, dated October 22th, 2002: 24 different cards (now reduced to 12), one for each hour of the day, each with a distinct global effect on the game which lasted for a whole round. However, I had in mind a lot of effects which were unique and thus impossible to be represented by few symbols (think about Ghost City): so written text was mandatory. Thanks to the freedom given to me by the written language, I was able to polish, modify, delete and add effects until I came to the final version, which sports very “strong” effects without losing balance.
Some of the cards have interesting stories behind. For example, the High Noon card is taken from a rule I use often in my BANG! tournaments: it is derived from the “Armageddon Clock Rule” introduced in the tournaments of the game Magic: The Gathering, which I played passionately for years, to stop lengthy matches.
The Ghost City has been the most discussed card: until I found a working text, I was tempted to put this card out of the expansion, because every version raised a huge amount of problems and rules exceptions… but the basic idea was just too appealing to me -- and players as well. The Gold Rush card was suggested by a friend of mine, Alessio Scimemi, and immediately was included in the final list of the expansion cards.
A special thank goes to Andrés J. Voicu for his painstaking playtesting work, to Silvano Sorrentino for his never ending flow of ideas and to all daVinci staff for their care and enthusiasm.
This little expansion wass printed in barely 3000 Italian/English bilingual copies (the same number with Dutch/German cards). It was sold at ridiculously low price, between 2 and 3 Euros, and often given freely away at conventions or fairs to whoever bought the BANG! basic set.
Actually, the success of this expansion has been somewhat exceptional: it sold out almost immediately and was never reprinted for yeats, while being crazily sought after by BANG! fans, even after Dodge City and A Fistful of Cards. As a matter of fact, it is widely appreciated for its simple mechanic and the nice effects of the cards, which mengles seamlessly with the core game, like Ghost Town and High Noon (the former because it lets eliminated players to come back to life, the latter for its capability of stopping any game in the next 5 minutes).
The search for this expansion, before The Bullet came out, was sometimes exceedingly furious: you could find on e-Bay teh Dutch/German edition sold with a base auction of 60 Euros, while the Italian/English version was so rare that it was almost impossible to get one, regardless of the price.
When The Bullet included High Noon again, daVinci wisely decided to give the reprinted cards a different border: so who owns the original High Noon can proudly show that's the few-of-a-kind first edition!