Year: 2024 | Players: 1-4 | Min: 15+ | Ages: 14+
This Gun It review was made after playing the game seven times. The publisher sent us a copy of this game in exchange for an honest review.
What is Gun It?
Gun It is a cooperative real-time programming game in which you work together to outmaneuver enemy vehicles and survive dangerous scenarios on the road.
Gun It was designed by Randy O’Connor and published by Randy O Games.
Rules Overview
In Gun It, you and your teammates are in a high-stakes race for survival as you navigate a grid filled with hostile vehicles. You need to work together to wreck enemies and avoid wrecking your crew car.
Setup
You’ll start by setting up a grid of hostile vehicles around your crew car. Each player receives action cards, like movement and weapon cards. You’ll also choose a scenario that lays out your objectives. Everyone gets one or more feature cards and secretly chooses the complexity level they want to use for that game, which determines how many extra rules and challenges you’ll face.
In four-player games, everyone controls one of the four crew members. With two players, both players control two crew members. In the three-player game, there’s a fourth shared hand of cards on the table that any player can use.
Round Structure
Each round is divided into four phases:
- Lookout Phase:
- You’ll begin by refilling the grid around the crew car with new hostile vehicles.
- If applicable, you’ll draw constraint cards, which offer extra challenges or choices to navigate, but these remain secret until the Planning Phase.
- Planning Phase:
- Here, you’ll reveal the constraints and decide how to distribute/trade action cards between you and your teammates. You’ll each end up with one order card (which determines your turn order), one direction card (indicating your movement or attack direction), and one equipment card (tools or weapons).
- You’ll have a limited amount of time to trade cards with your teammates and plan for the round.
- Action Phase:
- In this phase, everyone takes actions based on the order cards. You can either:
- Drive the Car: If you’re the driver, you’ll move the car in the direction shown on your direction card.
- Use a Weapon: If you’re a passenger, you’ll use your weapons to fire at enemy vehicles, dealing damage and trying to wreck them. Risky shots—firing a weapon past another crew member—require you to flip a coin to determine if your shot is successful or damages the crew car instead. You also flip a coin when there is a gap between your card and the target.
You’ll earn Excitement Points (XP) when you trigger pileups, which happen when multiple vehicles are wrecked in a single turn. At the end of each round, you’ll gain additional XP for any open spaces around your car. Depending on the scenario, XP might be part of your victory conditions or can be spent on in-game bonuses to help your crew.
- In this phase, everyone takes actions based on the order cards. You can either:
- Aftermath Phase:
- The grid collapses as vehicles are moved closer to your car.
- Any vehicles more than two spaces away are removed from the grid. The round counter then advances and you prep the next round.
Winning and Losing
You’ll win if you complete the scenario’s objectives, such as earning enough XP or surviving a set number of rounds.
You’ll lose if the crew car is destroyed or you fail to complete the scenario’s objectives.
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Pros and Cons
Pros
- Thematically, Gun It absolutely nails it. It’s hard not to feel like you’re right in the middle of a crazy gun fight on the road. The actions fit perfectly with the theme, and you’ll naturally say things that you would if you were inside the car. Bravo to the designer for pulling this off.
- Deciding who gets which action cards is genuinely fun and a tricky real-time puzzle. It gets even more challenging and tense when there are a bunch of hostiles with abilities on the road that you have to factor in.
- I really enjoy the wreck mechanic. Each car deals collateral damage in specific directions, which might seem random at first, but it’s more like the shooters strategically targeting the cars to make them wreck in just the right ways… or, when you mess up, mistiming their shots and causing chaos.
- This game has created more laugh-out-loud moments than most I’ve played in recent years. Being off by just one direction or order card can set off a hilariously chaotic chain of events, like driving forward too early and shooting at nothing. Or, the person in the backseat accidentally shooting inside the car or causing an unintended pileup.
- Gun It has very high replayability. The scenarios give you different types of objectives, enemies appear in a random order, and the constraint cards tweak what you can/can’t do each round. There’s a lot of game in this small box.
- I don’t think I’ve seen cooperative setup baked into a game’s rules before, but I really like it! Each crew member card includes its own setup instructions, so everyone’s involved right from the start.
- There’s an included introductory scenario to make jumping into your first game easy.
Cons
- The different “complexity levels” you choose before each game can make things more confusing than necessary. For example, one level adds abilities to cars when they take damage—a cool idea, but easy to forget during back-to-back games since the reminder is in small print on a single card. It’s not a huge issue, but there had to have been a smoother way to add in those new rules.
- One potential downside for some groups is that all players need to be pretty evenly skilled. If you’re not, you might run into some quarterbacking issues, where one or two players take over and make all the decisions for the team during the real-time planning phase.
- In my experience, the game is much easier to play when everyone is facing the same direction as the action. If you’re sitting upside down relative to the orientation of the cars, it can be confusing as you might accidentally program the crew car to move in the wrong direction or shoot in the wrong direction. After a couple of games, we adjusted seating to avoid these issues. This might not be a problem for every group, though.
- One other minor con is that the cars are on tiles, which makes them difficult to shuffle before each game. I understand why tiles were used since they need to be shifted around on the table pretty frequently, but cards would have been more practical for shuffling.
Final Thoughts
Gun It does the job of capturing the intense action of a chaotic car chase, which is all I really wanted from it. The real-time puzzle creates a tense yet fun experience, which kept us engaged even when things didn’t go exactly as planned (we were pretty bad at this game initially). Thematically, I don’t think the designer could have done much better.
This one’s definitely staying in my collection. Multiple people in my group love this theme, and there really aren’t any other co-op games like this out there right now. Plus, it’s nice to have another solid real-time filler game to add to the rotation.
I think a lot of different groups will have a blast with Gun It. Fans of programming games will get a kick out of trying to perfectly time their actions, most fans of puzzle board games will enjoy piecing together the perfect plan, and anyone who’s into the car chase theme will absolutely dig it.
Gun It Links
BGG | Randy O Games
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