King of the West: The Banished (2020)

There’s somethin’ in the town of Backwater that don’t belong. It fills the air with energy, like it feels before a storm. Except this storm ain’t one of wind and rain, but bullets and blood.

King of the West is a weird west themed area control card game. Three different sets of characters will be available at launch. One set can be played as a 2-3 player 18-card area control game, but multiple sets will allow for up to 9 players with the modified rules variant.

For the area control variant setup, nine building cards are randomly played on a 3x3 grid to make up the town. Six buildings are generic locations and the other three are the unique target locations. Since they are played randomly, the location of these target buildings will be different in every game.

Players can take three actions on their turn: Claim a Building, Move, and Shootout! Shootouts are how you remove opponents from the buildings you want. You do this by trying to get into your opponent's head and outthink them using a nuanced rock-paper-scissors combat system.

The game ends when either a player starts their turn controlling all three target locations or they are the only player controlling any buildings in the town.

With multiple sets and a larger player count, your still fighting over buildings, but instead of gaining a new location every turn, you are limited to what you start with. Players can't be eliminated though and when you run out of your buildings, you can steal someone elses. Other than that, combat works in the same way and the winner is the last person (or team!) left with claimed buildings.