Real gamblers play russian roulette with shotguns. That is the core concept of Buckshot Roulette, the Inscryption-looking game of blinksweat and bulletworry. It’s been out for a while now but the developers have just added a fun extra – a 4-person multiplayer mode.
They teased this multiplayer mode earlier in the year but just posted the update on Steam yesterday. The game remains one of uncertain trigger pulling. A handful of shells – some duds, some live – are loaded into a shotgun in a random and unseen order. Players then take turns pointing the gun at one another (or themselves) and committing their lives to lady luck. Click! Phew, this one was a dud.
But look, what’s Nipplemancer69 doing? He’s slugging a beer, ejecting a shell, clicking on a mysterious gadget, and smoking a cigarette… Wait, wait, don’t point that at me, Nipplemancer69! Have you even kept count of the shells correctly!? Stop. STOP.
Click.
Oh thank heavens. Between each reloading of the shotgun you get a bunch of items to make use of against your friends, you see. A cell phone with a mysterious voice on the other end, for example, who tells you what the fifth or sixth shell will be. Or a gizmo that lets you steal a device straight out of your opponent’s pile. All this on top of the main game’s health-regenerating cigarettes and beer cans that let you eject a shell.
There are other devices I’m far less keen on. These cause players to miss a turn, for instance, or reverse the turn order of the entire table. It’s possible as a result to play a whole round without ever even laying hands on the gun. Turn-skipping mechanics in board games annoy me for the same reason. It’s frustrating to sit there and helplessly watch an entire game happen around you. And in a chatless internet game setting, it really invites people to quit. I much prefer the more interesting gadgets, like the do-hicky that reverse the “polarity” of the shell in the chamber.
It’s best done with pre-existing pals – there’s no servers. If you do want to shoot strangers though, you can join the Discord of the game’s publisher, Critical Reflex, where lots of people are dumping lobby codes into a “looking for game” channel. It’s not perfect as multiplayer goes, but on the plus side it’s a supremely cheap game at around £2. So the buy-in is not particularly high. And the core concept – trying to keep track of live rounds and dud rounds while people muddy the waters with gadgetry – remains compelling enough to get a few tense and funny moments, as players miscount and accidentally blow their own heads off. (Yes, I did do this. Leave me alone.)