Boardgame: Banditos - Oozing with Tarantino ish theme as your getaway car is a 67 Dodge Dart sh*tbox.

My buddy Jim and I sat down to play Banditos from Baksha Games and we thoroughly enjoyed it despite finding out about 2 hours into it  that we were missing important errata: To win, you need to steal 100 million Mexican pesos, but the peso money cards we got in the box were each missing three zeros (000) at the end of each amount. Luckily, I eventually went to Boardgamegeek to see what we were doing wrong and read the errata.

Banditos feels like a Quentin Tarantino road movie.. Lots of long rides in the dusty Mexican desert punctuated with robbing banks and getting away in mostly 60s and 70s shitboxes: '68 Volkswagon Van, '75 Chrysler Cordoba, '74 Buick Electra, '68 Chevy El Camino, '67 Dodge Dart to name a few. Lots of other 70s and 80s references too (another Tarantino obsession): references to Joan Jett, Magnum P.I., Poltergeist, etc. Even some of the characters you can play are Tarantino ish: eg. Hunny Bunny, etc.

You can get desperate, just like a criminal. At the end, I was speeding, robbing gas stations and even $20 from the discard pile in order to get to the Mexican town so I can do my real stealing.

Jim on his move

As we were playing, we just happened to be listening to various Santana songs and renditions of Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It was well suited.

I really liked this game. It was very light and didn't include a lot of brainpower, and it felt just right after a long day. If you lived through the 60s to the 80s, you'll appreciate the homage to that time especially.

That being said, the rules need a little work. They seem a bit skimpy. It's not clear for instance, who goes first. Some improvements to the rules need to be made, especially around crossing the border and speeding. It's strange that having a stolen vehicle is not an impediment to crossing the border and that there are no rules against speeding across the border. Also, why don't weapons get any heat tokens? There is no incentive in ditching your weapon and exchanging for another one. In other words, I see a lot people adding their own house rules to the game to make it more advanced and longer.

Anyways, not bad for $30 bucks Cdn. The only thing missing was the "hero's walk" soundtrack. You know what I mean:

Thumbs up!