Rock Hard 1977

Warning: I am probably the most stubbornly anti-Eurogame person at this site, so the following opinion about a new Euro game is of questionable and likely debased merit.

In the mid-'70s, Joan Jett and Lita Ford started a rock band with some other teenage girls, and had a real hit single with Cherry Bomb. Their bass player, Jackie Fox, later went to Harvard Law School (along with some rando named Barack Obama), and became an entertainment lawyer. Then she designed a board game that got published this year: Rock Hard 1977. RH77 is definitely a Euro worker placement game, but I believe that it transcends that limited subgenre because the designer started with theme/setting and built the game around it.

The board looks a bit like a colorful spreadsheet with a typical euro vp track. The rest of the components are great, especially the guitar picks and the amps that come complete with dials that go to 11. The play money is too real, right down to the texture, and the graphic designer added a lot of neat little touches throughout the game. The components alone are enough to ground this game in the rock section of the music industry in the mid-'70s, but the rest of the game also delivers on the promise of the premise.

Each round of the game represents a typical day for your aspiring rock star during a month of 1977. The first round is in April, and the final round is in December. Each rounds consists of three turns (shifts): Day, Night, and After Hours. Most potential actions can only be done during a specific shift, though there are four generic actions that can be performed during any shift. Day is the time of day for the regular business world: hiring promo people and roadies, cutting record deals, doing radio interviews, etc. Night is gigs, which can range from playing at a bar mitzvah to playing in a big arena. You can also rent rehearsal space in either Day or Night turns. After Hours is mostly about hitting the clubs to network in the industry, or you can record a demo tape or just go to bed early (in order to go first on the next turn.) At any time of day, you can sell blood, write songs, and buy or sell drugs (euphemistically called "candy" in this game).

The goal is to maximize your Fame score. To get there, you need to boost your three stats (Chops, Reputation, and Songs), play gigs, and do memorable things in the late night bar scene. You start the game with a Musician with a special ability, a Personal Experience, a Manager, a Job, and a couple of Personal Goals. The Job is an interesting element. Early in the game, you won't be able to play lucrative gigs until you record a demo tape and get a record deal, so you need to show up for work. Your Job could be anything from bartender to truck driver to massage therapist, and your work shift will either be variable (massage therapist) or maybe tied to a specific shift (bartenders work Nights). If you don't work in a given round, you will get a Warning token. If you miss work three times, you lose your Job and must rely on your musical ability to make a living.

Normally each player gets only one action per turn, signified by placing your musician standee on the action space on the board. Many spaces are restricted to a single player, while others allow any number of players. At the bigger gig spaces, the first player to place can grab the headliner space for more rewards, with slower players relegated to opening act positions on that space. The primary way to get additional actions is to take Candy (amphetamines). You discard a Candy token and draw a Sugar Rush card, and that typically gives you one free action for the round, and increases your Craving stat by one. Then you immediately roll a d6, and if the result is less than your current Craving score, you must go to rehab for your Day action on the following round.

I don't consider this article to be front page material because I have only played twice so far, and at low players counts. And I have a busy six weeks ahead with no chance to play RH77 again for a while. The game scales from 2 to 5 players, and a 2-player game utilizes a dummy character (The Rising Star) who follows a preset script to block out a specific space for each turn of each round for the whole game. My first game was a two-player game, so we used The Rising Star to tighten up the board placements. The game was fun, but not especially close, because I got blocked out of key board positions a couple of times by The Rising Star, leaving me stuck in my bartender job well into August. The second game was with three players, so no Rising Star. I played better this time, but still got soundly beaten by both of the other players, who both happen to be legit part-time musicians.

The turns and rounds could theoretically go quickly, but there is a lot of open information on the board and a lot of freedom. So the projected play time of 90 minutes tops is optimistic and based on experienced players. Both of my plays took over two hours despite the low player counts, but I could definitely see how experienced players could take their turns within a minute. Still that would be at least 27 minutes per player. There is some hidden information, in the form of some personal goals and also the random events, random gigs, and random encounters in the bars.

The rule book is very organized and based around the turn structure. The rules are fairly intuitive because they are grounded in the setting. The game looks good on the table. The theme is novel and appealing. The worst that I can say about the game is that the plethora of components makes for lengthy setup and takedown time. All in all, Rock Hard 1977 is a very good game that transcends its Euro game foundation.

I just played this for the first time last week! I liked it.

I'm very much over the Big Complicated Euro, so just simply this being more streamlined was nice/refreshing.

One thing I wasn't sure about was whether or not I liked the game because of the game itself or because the theme (and jokes about candy) elevated the experience. I'm not sure if I'd have enjoyed it as much had it been about trading in the Mediterranean or optimizing workers in the Industrial Revolution. I'm sure more games of it will give me a better sense of whether it was more the theme or mechanics that I enjoyed, or maybe it was just a nice balance of the two.

As a self-proclaimed anti-Eurogamer, do you think you'd have enjoyed it as much with a different theme?

Theme matters.

Good question. I think that the theme was crucial to my liking the game. There are a lot of worker placement games out there, simulating economic activity in various specific cultures or time periods, and I generally don't enjoy them because they feel so dry. Even if the game was tied to something that I could relate to, like say drug discovery in the pharma industry, I don't think it would have fired up my imagination much. Or if this game had a more AmeriTrash theme, like leveling up adventurers in a dungeon, I would have resented the discrepancy between theme and mechanics. But the music industry of the '70s is both economic and historical in nature, and yet more interesting for featuring sex, drugs, and rock and roll.