I played High Noon Saloon at GenCon 2014.

“The last one standin’ wins, and there ain’t no prize for second.” This is what the demonstrator said to me and it’s the quote from the back of the box that made me sit down and try the fast, easy to learn, and sometimes downright hilarious board game High Noon Saloon. (Slugfest Games, 2011) I’ll tell you right now that by the end of that quick demo I bought the game and by the end of this review you’ll want to as well. This game has a lot going for it; the learning curve is very small, two to six players can be involved in a shootout with the number of players changing the strategy but not hurting the quick paced gameplay and the price is nothing to shake a “Hunk O’Wood” at.

This game is fast paced and even faster to be picked up and learned making it a great game for the whole family. When I sat down for my demonstration I had a look at one of the six Rules Summary Sheets (one for each player) and thought this game would be too complicated to be a fun game for the whole family and seemed to be only aimed at gamers. I was wrong. In less than 5 minutes all of the players were handling complex rules because that’s the good thing about all of the rules, they’re easy to learn and most importantly of all, they make sense. For instance, if you’re taking cover behind the piano you get a +2 bonus to your defense. This is logical, so when you find out that if someone else attacks you and they’re behind the piano with you, you don’t get your +2 bonus, this also makes sense. This logical rule set allows for all levels of gamers to pick up the game and have fun.

When you play the game with two, three, four, five or six players the rules don’t have to get any more complex if players don’t want to but if everyone’s up for it you can add some really fun team cards. Speaking of complex rules, you can play an easy version of the game or the advanced version of the game just by flipping over everyone’s character cards. On one side you have your character with no special ability, with names like Lisa Barstock and The Man With No Name. If everyone wants to play the advanced game, which we were ready to after just one game, you flip your character card over and you have a special ability unique to your character as well as being able to play with teams by adding the 18 team cards included with the game. These three factors; number of players, using advanced character cards and playing teams adds a lot of variety and fun to the game.

This game has a lot of fun components. There are over 100 cards and a lot of them have fun names like Hunk O’Wood, Chair (because who doesn’t want to hit someone with a chair) and Swingin’ On The Chandelier. The game also comes with 8 character cards, 8 character pawns, 6 player mats, 6 heart shaped “grit” markers, 14 bullet markers, map/board of the saloon, as well as the previously mentioned cards, rules summary cards and an easy to understand rulebook. All of this great fun crammed into one box only cost me $25. I’ve already played about 3 games over two hours so that’s $12.50/hour or $8.33/game. That doesn’t include the time spent playing the demo or all my future games and fun that I will definitely have.

So now that you want to buy it. Head on over to http://slugfestgames.com/ and pick yours up today for only $29.95 (mine was discounted at Gencon 2014) plus shipping (Slugfest Games, 2014) because, “The last one standin’ wins, and there ain’t no prize for second.”

Works Cited

Slugfest Games. (2011). High Noon Saloon. United States of America: Slugfest Games.

Slugfest Games. (2014). Slugfest Games- High Noon Saloon. Retrieved from Slugfest Games- High Noon Saloon: http://slugfestgames.com/games/hns-2/