With A Smile & A Gun is live
With A Smile & A Gun is a 1-2 player dice drafting and area control game about rival mafia gangs during the Prohibition era. It launched on Kickstarter on July 14 (we missed it), and the campaign will run for 28 days. You may pledge for either a copy of the game or its PnP version.
The solo mode of A Smile & A Gun has been designed by Carla Kopp, and, in the standard version, it pits you against the Rue Morgue Crew. The difficulty is adjustable, and in the rulebook you will find more gangs to compete with as well as the option of beating your own score.
To play the game, you will first roll 13 dice to form a dice pool, and then pull tokens from the bag to fill each of the city districts. For each blue square on the tokens that you placed in a district, you add a police cube. Then, it's time to take actions, alternating turns between yourself and the AI. On your turn, you select 2 dice: one for movement and one for actions.
To move, you move your gang boss as many spaces around the board as the value of your die. A number of Influence cubes are placed where the boss stopped: in the row or column that he is facing.
To perform an action, you take the action that corresponds to the number you rolled. Actions allow you to manipulate cubes: add, move, remove Influence or place police. Then it's the Rue Morgue Crew's turn. They first roll the lowest value die in the dice pool and return it to the pool. Then, they either follow you in your location, or move as close to you as possible, depending on the available to them dice. They also place influence cubes and choose an action die according to the AI rules, but they don't perform actions.
The next phase is the Shadow's turn: a mysterious figure that may either help or hurt you. The very last die in the dice pool that wasn't used by either you or the AI, is taken by the Shadow. The Shadow moves around the board as many spaces as the number on the die, and performs the action shown on its card.
The Police is also after you: you add the values of the 3 action dice and compare them to the AI's: if the AI has a higher total, it gains a 3 victory point token. If not, you receive an influence cube bonus. Then, you proceed to settle the score for the current round, checking whether you or the AI has more cubes in each district. At the end of the third round, the game is over and you tally up the final score for both you and the Rue Morgue Crew.
Lol, Rahdo sells me on so many games. He's got a great ability to make me feel like I'm playing the game instead of him. He explains his thought process for the moves he makes and I can just imagine myself making those same decisions.
We are twins, right? I really enjoyed Rahdo's solo playthrough as well. Also, I like area control games, even in solo (Dual Powers and to some extent Outlive have that). So I put a 48-hour reminder on this Kickstarter campaign, but thinking I won't back is just some fiction...
Rahdo's video sold me on this one. The automa has an advantage to make up for it's lack of thinking and it looks fairly easy to run its turns. A nice little puzzley game and not too expensive.