It’s a Long Way to the Top in Rock Hard 1977
Photo by Keith Law
I go to two board game conventions every year, Gen Con and PAX Unplugged, and while both are a blast, I am definitely getting a little fatigue when it comes to seeing new games—so many of them just look the same and run completely together. For a long time it was games based in ancient Egypt or Greece. We’ve got a slew of games set in Japan, almost never by Japanese designers. There was a run of pirate games. This year it seemed like we had a ton of space corporation games—yes, corporations, but, like, in space.
Rock Hard 1977, the game I tabbed as the #1 game I saw at the convention, managed to break through the clutter because of its theme: You’re a wannabe rock star in 1977, and you have a limited amount of time to make your dreams come true. You have a day job that you might show up to, but maybe at some point you decide you can afford to quit, or just can’t afford to give up that studio time. You’ll rehearse, hire publicists, record a demo tape in the small hours, maybe get a record deal and play some bigger gigs. And maybe you’ll need a little extra pep in your step so you can pack more than 24 hours into your day. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a game like it, and given who designed it, I shouldn’t be surprised: Jackie Fuchs, known back in the 1970s as Jackie Fox, the bassist for one of the most important bands in rock history, the Runaways.
Fuchs is a serious board gamer herself and has said part of the genesis of the game was her frustration with games for five players that result in a ton of downtime between your turns. (Her designer diary on Rock Hard 1977 is an incredible read.) Rock Hard 1977’s turns are very quick, and the whole game really hums along—pun somewhat intended—for an experience that is both satisfying and will also leave you thinking about the things you otherwise should have done.
You start out the game with Chops, Songs, and Reputation base stat scores of 2 apiece, marked via knobs on your personal player board, which looks quite a bit like a Marshall amp. (In one of the game’s many clever nods to rock history, the knobs all go to 11.) You also begin with a dollar tucked inside your shoe, a lousy job that requires your presence during one of the three parts of the round, a manager of limited utility, some personal goals, and a particular character power or benefit. There are nine rounds in the game, representing the months April through December, and each round comprises a single day, with a morning phase, an evening phase, and an after hours phase. You’ll take one action in each phase, although there’s a way to get more. Almost all of the actions involve increasing one or more of your three base stats, sometimes at the cost of money, and many have a minimum requirement, such as needing specific levels of base stats to get a record deal, which in turn you need to play any of the three largest venues. You can skip the after-hours phase to go to bed early and become the start player in the next round, although you’re giving up the potential gain of a night on the town (usually, but not always, an increase in stats or cash) and the 5 points you get for collecting a card from each of the four hotspots.
So in theory, that’s 27 total actions in the game, three in each of nine rounds. There is a way to get extra actions, though, called “candy.” I mean, it’s coke, we’re all adults here, that’s cocaine, although Fuchs did write that she switched the design from drugs to candy to encompass all of the vices that people use to get around the limitations of the clock. I can’t not see this as coke, though. Anyway, you can buy candy through one action, and many other actions will give you one or more candy tokens as a reward. You can then spend a candy token before any turn to take a card from the “sugar rush” deck, usually getting one bonus action but occasionally getting two or zero. You then turn up your cravings dial and roll the die; if it’s lower than your current craving level, you crash, and in the next round you must skip your day action and take the long road up to Recovery. It’s often worth the risk; in the same way that you can’t win in the game Brass unless you take out at least one loan, you can’t win in Rock Hard 1977 unless you take a sniff or two. Those extra actions are key, even with some limitations on how you can use them—you can’t double up on certain things, like hogging both rehearsal spaces (in a 2-3 player game) or hiring two crew members in one day phase. Some personal objective cards are probably impossible to achieve without doing a line or two. I mean, having some chocolate. Same thing.
The playing experience ends up a lot lighter than I expected given the look of the board and the sheer weight of the box, which is not a criticism. It’s a very strong mid-weight game, one you can pretty much play with anyone who’s played a worker-placement game before—here, you have just one worker, so it’s as much about managing your actions as placing your workers—and that isn’t that hard to teach. I might quibble with some of the icon choices, such as the crossed-out candy symbol on spaces you can’t use to double up with extra actions, or the color dependency of some of the icons to show what you pay, what is required, and what you receive, but those are pretty minor nitpicks.
The art and components here are excellent as well, and there’s a ton of thought throughout, from those amplifier player boards to the references to characters’ genders as male, female, or androgynous to all the flavor text on various character and life experience cards. There are plenty of great games out there with mediocre or pasted-on themes; there are also some great themes that don’t hold up as games. Rock Hard 1977 manages to pull off both. It’s a game I’d want in my collection just for its looks, but I also think it’s going to be fun to break out with gamer friends and non-gamers alike.
Keith Law is the author of The Inside Game and Smart Baseball and a senior baseball writer for The Athletic. You can find his personal blog the dish, covering games, literature, and more, at meadowparty.com/blog.