Although Saturday gaming is supposed to start at 7PM, in
practice everytime I've shown up at 7 everyone was always in
a game. So I was surprised when, showing up at 6:45, I was
the first gamer to arrive at Madness Comics (in Plano, TX).

But people started straggling in immediately and we began
the usual gaming dance. You all know it: OK, there are
four of us so how about Tigris & Euphrates?
Oops, now we are five, maybe we try El Grande.

But at 7 we had six people. So I turn to Steven and say
"Would these people like Ca$h 'n Gun$"? Three of us,
Steven, Thomas, and I had played before, but Kevin,
Monty, and Jonathan had not.

Kevin asked "What's it about"? I answered, "You point guns at people
and take their money". My fellow Texans don't shy away from
stereotypes, and this was no exception.

Their faces all lit up, and as one they got up from the table.
Kevin said "Mine's in my trunk". Monty added "I have spares
if yall need them." I didn't quite hear from Jonathan said,
but it was something about a "sniper scope".

"No no no" Steven and I both cried! "The guns are provided by the game."
Everyone was a bit crestfallen but were still eager to try it out.
As I handed out the guns, Kevin started cackling evily. Jonathan
just began to polish his gun on his sleeve, and Monty, sitting
between Thomas and me, kept nervously glancing at us.

If you haven't played Ca$h 'n Gun$ before, everyone gets a character
with a gun, eight loads (5 blanks, and 3 "bangs"). On each of the
eight rounds you lay out money chits (5, 10, and 20 thousand $).
You "load" your gun and at the count of 1-2-3 everyone simultaneously
point their gun at someone. After some talked we count to 1-2-3 again
and anyone who can drop their gun. Then we reveal the 'bullets'
and anyone with a bang shoots their target (if they didn't drop out).
Those still standing divide the money between them.
If you're shot three times you die and lose.
After eight rounds, you subtract $5k for each time you
chickened out. Then whoever has the most money wins.

So Steven is usually the bag man. The first round the money was
very low. Plus everyone wasn't ready to expend their bullets,
so there wasn't more than one gun pointing at anyway, no
one dropped out, and everyone used blanks.

The second round was different. The bag man laid out all $20k
markers. Everyone knew bullets were going to fly.
At the count of three everyone pointed at my half of the table.
Steven and I stared down the barrel at each other.
Kevin pointed at me as well, and Thomas, Jonathan, and Monty
all pointed at our end of the table.

We all started chuckling evily. Except for Steven and I.

Now the store owner, Chris, has to deal with gamers, so he's
usually pretty unflappable. But just then he walked out
of his back office. He took three steps and glanced right
noticing us. He froze dead in his tracks seeing a table
of gamers pointing guns at each other.

Without moving our guns we stared back at Chris. It was
dead silent for a minute. Then Steven said, in a gravely voice,
"Walk away. Just walk away, and don't look back."

Once he was gone, bullets began to fly. I took Steven
down first (everyone has a single bang-bang-bang card that
goes off before ordinary bang cards). As Steven went down,
cursing me, Thomas shot him again, for good measure.
Kevin put a bullet in me, and took one from the other half
of the table.

This left Monty, Jonathan, and Thomas to get $45 each.
Since most games I've seen, the winner has around $90-$100,
this was a very good start. For them.

I strongly suggested to our half of the table that we needed
to aim mostly at the people with money. This only partly worked
as Kevin kept aiming at me.

By the sixth round we had caught up a lot, when Steven
went down in a hail of bullets, dead. Everyone kept aiming
at Thomas who had to chicked out, a lot.

One thing you learn about Texans is that, while other people
might see four guns pointing at them and decide there
was too great a chance for getting shot and drop out,
Texans are different. I kept hearing them say to themselves,
"I'm tough. I can take it." So there was a lot less
dropping out than if we played with people more, ahem,
rational.

The final round two people chicked out, one was shot, and
Thomas and I split a large pile of money.
Monty had gotten shot or bluffed out a lot,
and Jonathan got little after his first windfall.

I ended up winning with $105k. This was my first win
of Ca$h 'n Gun$.

I think Texas is going to see a lot more gunplay after this.

John R. Mellby
February 3, 2007