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Bantam West. An immersive sim adventure board game for 2-4 players set in the wild frontier. Brawl, loot, burn, and trade as one of four deadly strangers in this open-world sandbox. As you wake each day, you must form a plan and play on your character’s unique strengths, weaknesses, and personality to outperform the competition. Whether you live the life of a powerful merchant, an agile gunslinger, a malicious arsonist, or a stealthy thief, there is a unique way for you to come out on top.
Why I Was Interested In Bantam West
You may have seen me drooling over this one, like a teenager watching the scene with Megan Fox for the first time lifting the hood of the car in the Transformers (2007) film, for a while now. So, here is the review after much play online with the designer Ike and some other wonderful content creators. Will Bantam West make you as hype as the video game Red Dead Redemption did and fill your games room with epic stories in a forgotten world, or will it leave you with disappointing Blazing Saddles (like that night out where I agreed to eat the curry with a spice level aptly named "lads night out")?
Gameplay Modes
There are many different ways you can play Bantam West. You can start with nothing and slowly build yourself up or you can choose to start an "Expedited Game", which I loved, where all players start with a horse (chosen randomly) that increases movement capabilities and a special field maxed out in one of the 4 main types of craft. This expedited mode allows for faster gameplay due to greatly improved movement and the skills allow for greater benefits in the field. Players can be nasty to each or choose to allow one another to live peacefully. It truly is an open ended experience.
Either way you choose to play one thing you can guarantee is the smiles on the faces of every playing. I have never played a game that was not ridiculously fun and each time we played new stories emerged that were unique and interesting.
Gameplay
At the start of the game each player is tasked with achieving an agreed upon number of notoriety points. You can play a short game for 5 points or extend the game to anywhere up to 15 points. So you could be looking at a 45 minute game or you could be looking at a 5 hour game, the choice really is yours!! Great for people who sometimes only have a free hour but on other days can dedicate a whole afternoon to a session.
Players start the game in the beautiful town of Gallow Springs. Here you are embarking on an adventure; looking for fame and fortune. Immediately, you are faced with the basic tasks of life, such as feeding yourself and finding money to buy land/property. As your wealth grows the possibilities at your disposal also increase meaning more impactful decisions to make as the game progresses.
Will you build an enterprise and become a hero or will you try to burn down your rival player's cabins and kill their followers? Either way there can be only one winner in a game of Bantam West so if more than one person is at the winning line at the end of the game, it could all come down to a tense shootout at The Saloon. Last-man standing wins at this rodeo.
Day & Night Phases
There are 2 main phases; day and night. During the day time phase each player takes it in turns to do their actions which can be done in any order they choose and players can do as many actions as their "Grit" (basically this game's stamina) will allow.
There are lots of actions you can do such as move, endeavor, buy/sell, use an item, build a cabin, burn (YAY BURRNNN), fight, breach, loot and quite a few other things that I won't list here so I don't spoil too much for you. Once you have done all of your day time actions you collectively administer the night time effects which are done in order; sleep, extreme weather, restore, restock, fires grow, enemies heal and pass the first player token clockwise. Each day/night phase counts as 1 month of in-game time.
Components
The components for the physical game look excellent from the pictures I have seen and the artwork on all the game components is also fantastic. The cards have easy to follow images that make sense and quickly become easy to use. You can tell that the designer Ike has thought about this a lot, tested it a tonne and changed things when they did not work. He has not been afraid of taking the scalpel to areas of the game that needed removing or for asking for feedback on areas where he thinks improvements are needed. This has led to a hugely rewarding game that excites at the mere thought of another playthrough.
The only downside that I can see is that there is a lot to learn but, once you do it is so worthwhile. The finished rulebook is said to be a mighty beast and some players may not want to learn this many rules and have to spend so much time reading before playing. Luckily I had Ike on hand to answer any issues as we played. I personally cannot wait to dive deeper in to the world of Bantam West when my all-in Kickstarter package arrives.
Final Impressions
Insanely fun story building game where each play through is going to be different and all players will come out with a smile on their faces.
Do you want to be a dirty sun of a gun and burn down some of your friends huts or do you want to avoid confrontation whilst building up a nice sum of money and hoping that nobody else tries to hold you up at gunpoint? I love, love, love Bantam West and can't wait to get my own physical copy. If you like Red Dead Redemption and you don't buy this then you need to take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror. I am all-in on the campaign and if that doesn't convince you to give this game a try then I do not know what will.
NOTE - I played on Tabletopia so I expect my final score for the physical copy to rise to 9.5 or 10 when it arrives. The minis and unique player huts look awesome but, I have yet to hold them or see them in real-life. Thanks to Ike for playing with me and allowing me early access to the game for this review. Super excited for this to release and for everyone else to get their hands on it.
