Jackie Fuchs Talks Rock Hard 1977: From the Runaways to Board Games

Jackie Fuchs has already done “famous.” Under the name Jackie Fox, she was the original bassist for the seminal 1970s rock band the Runaways, which spawned a couple of solo rock stars in Joan Jett and Lita Ford while inspiring a whole generation of women musicians. There was a documentary about the band in 2004, and a fictional movie about them for which Fuchs declined to license her likeness. Their biggest hit, “Cherry Bomb,” has over 213 million streams on Spotify, more than respectable for a song nearly a half-century old. Now, at 64, she’s experiencing a different sort of fame, thanks to a new set of fans.

“Being board game famous is weird,” says Fuchs. “I haven’t been (famous) for so long.” She appeared on the Youtube board gaming show GameNight in 2019, introducing her to a new audience, and now she’s becoming an even bigger name in the space thanks to her first board game design, Rock Hard 1977, based on her experiences in the music industry a half-century ago.

Fuchs defies just about any expectations you might have of a one-time rock star—although that hardly scratches the surface of her career or her life. After leaving the Runaways, she quit music entirely, went to UCLA to study linguistics, then to Harvard Law School where she had some classmate named Barack Obama, and later on became a four-time Jeopardy! champion. She reads about Russian history for leisure. She owns a hard copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, which she proudly showed me on our Zoom conversation. (I admit I was impressed, and a bit jealous.) And she’s always been something of a gamer. 

“I had every board game as a kid,” she recalls. “Monopoly, Life, Candyland I’m reluctant to admit, Sorry, Trouble, Parcheesi, Mousetrap, Crazy Clock, Operation”—one gets the sense that she’s picturing a shelf in her memory and rattling off the titles in order—“we were big on games. We also played a lot of card games, especially cribbage, so I grew up playing games. And we played games in the car. Wordle we’ve been doing for a thousand years. All the little word games that were in the newspaper. But then you grow up and life intervenes, you start going to concerts, you get into sports, you study”—she does not mention the part about playing those concerts, merely going to them—“but when I was in college I played a lot of arcade and computer games. I don’t know if you remember Infocom (publishers of Zork and other text-based adventure games). You’d write KILL TROLL, and it would ask, ‘what do you want to kill it with,’ so you’d write KILL TROLL WITH AXE,’ and they got more sophisticated and puzzly and interesting.

“I went to work for Infocom as a play tester during my first year of law school which is crazy, nobody does that,” she says. “I tested a game based on Clavell’s Shogun and it was a terrible game. I had to play it over and over and over, and I thought ‘I think I’ll just focus on my studies.’ So I left but I met my ex there and we started playing D&D second edition and Shadowrun first edition, that’s how far back that goes.”

Fuchs graduated from Harvard Law in 1992, and like most young lawyers, had little time to breathe, let alone play role-playing or other games. “I was a film lawyer, when you have free time you are networking, I had to go see a lot of premieres which is not as fun as it sounds, and I tried to go to the gym to have some semblance of a life,” she says. She did go to some trivia nights, and when a friend from one of those mentioned he was trying to get back into D&D, Fuchs thought about doing the same. “The meetup that was closest to me said ‘come prepared with a L8 character generated,’” which, for folks unfamiliar with the game, is not exactly the way for someone who hasn’t played in 10 years to jump back in. “Then I saw right below it there was a listing for a board game meetup a few blocks away at a local pizza parlor, and I went, ‘you know what, I’m just going to go to that and see what kind of games they play.’ I walked in and got invited to this table and we played four really different games and I made friends with people because basically I played an alien and I ate them all. It’s a good way to make friends!”

Fox appreciates the board game hobby for the intellectual challenge, but also for the way it can bring disparate people together out of a common interest. “If you have friends who are a little bit socially awkward, it’s a way to ease into a conversation with them because you’re all sitting around doing something you love,” she explains. “You can just sit down with people and get to know them for who they are. Maybe you find out after you’ve fallen in love with a group of people that they have very different viewpoints than you do.”

Rock Hard 1977 works like a lot of games in its weight class, with some light worker placement, some end-game objectives, and some simple set collection elements, but it is the theme that sets it apart and has driven so many positive reviews. Fuchs based the game play and its narrative elements on her own experiences in the music industry, both as a musician and as an entertainment lawyer. 

“I found out through a music writer friend of mine, that he had been talking about my game with Steve Miller—yes, that Steve Miller,” Fuchs says. “(Miller) was writing joke board game moves back to him, and they were exactly the kind of events that mess you up. As my friend put it, he’s been living this for his entire life! I felt validated having a few events that just mess with your planning because that’s what happens when you’re in a rock band.

“The Runaways were booked for some reason to open for Bob Seger in Philadelphia, and we had to drive from the Midwest all night to get there. We get to the hotel at like seven in the morning, get into bed, fall asleep, get woken at noon for an interview, and immediately get told, ‘oh, by the way, the gig is cancelled for tonight, Bob Seger’s drummer broke his leg and they can’t find a sub.’” (Seger’s drummer, Charlie Martin, had been hit by a car while walking, breaking both his legs and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.) “That was when I looked at a map, learned where Philadelphia is, realized how close it was to New York and went see ya! I’ll go buy a ticket to Texas, because this is how brilliantly we were booked, from the Midwest to Philadelphia to Texas. Like, genius. So I just went off for a couple of days in New York. So in the game, you can be planning your stuff for an entire turn and it’s gonna get foiled. But the more you play the game, you start to know what cards you might see that you haven’t seen and you plan around that.”

The game has its random elements, like event cards, and the “candy” that stands in for drugs or other ways to get more than 24 hours into a day, but Fuchs wanted a game that balanced the unpredictability of the musician’s life with the strategic depth of the games she loves to play. “One of my favorite games is Dune Imperium. There’s some luck in what cards come up at what time, but part of why I like it is that the theme is so baked into the choices that you get to make. When the theme is really incorporated into a game it makes learning and remembering the game easier, and it points you to a strategy.”

Rock Hard 1977 is a midweight game, considering its difficulty level and time to play, but Fuchs herself loves heavier and longer titles. “The first time I read about Gloomhaven, I thought, ‘this has me all over it,’” she says. “I bought a copy, started a group, and had people over to play games. My Gloomhaven group blew up so I ended up finishing it solo. That’s when I had cats who were well behaved so I could leave everything set up for months.” She also cites Dune: Imperium and The Voyages of Marco Polo among her all-time favorites, along with the very heavy games designed by Vital Lacerda, which can easily run to three hours.  

“We started with a very complex game, but scaled it back,” says Fuchs. “I was aiming for Wingspan complexity, then I pulled some parts out to save for an expansion.” That made the game more accessible to players without a lot of board game experience, and also helped keep the price point low, with an MSRP of $49.99. “I wanted it to be accessible to newer gamers but something serious hobbyist gamers would want to play. You worry when you’re designing in that midpoint that you’re going to get a game that’s too light for serious gamers and too hard for newer gamers to learn. I agonized about that.”

Jackie Fox (left) with The Runaways at CBGB’s, 1976 (Getty)

Fuchs is surprisingly comfortable talking about herself for someone who says she never liked or enjoyed the spotlight. “I have never been good at self-promotion and this was the year that changed. I’m so set up to promote and help out other people—I could get amazing deals for other people but I couldn’t go in and ask for a raise for myself,” she says. “You’re afraid if you ask for anything for yourself they’re going to kick you out of this club that they’ve finally let you into. In the board gaming space I’m not worried about that any more because it’s welcoming. I’m part of the cool kids club now and they’re not kicking me out.”

That sense of being in the club hit Fuchs early on, even when she was first designing Rock Hard 1977 and showing people prototypes. “People in the industry want to help you. They want to mentor you. When my game came out, Elizabeth Hargrave (the designer of Wingspan and Undergrove) was so supportive. I never had that in my entire career in the entertainment industry, which is most of my life. Never had somebody mentor me who wasn’t trying to sleep with me, never had people just offer to help out of the goodness of their hearts. Everybody had an ulterior motive. In the board game industry, you genuinely just get people who are trying to be helpful. I got help from Geoffrey Engelstein (The Expanse, Space Cadets) on how to translate text on the board into icons. Every publisher that touched the game, even if they passed on publishing it, gave me ideas and those got incorporated. I stayed friendly with the publishers I had worked with and they offered suggestions when we were going into production. People are unbelievable in the boar game industry.”

Fuchs looks forward to paying that kindness forward, talking about helping other designers with their games, such as another rock-themed game coming to crowdfunding in 2025 called Rivals of Rock by Candace Harris, or working with groups trying to improve representation of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ designers in the space. “I playtested Rivals of Rock and made a pretty significant contribution to how it plays which is a really good feeling,” she says. “It’s just unbelievable how we all support each other. Candace has turned around in supporting me and putting me on her podcast and talking about my game. We just help each other.”

Her design of a hit board game and her selfless attitude have made her a rock star—pun entirely intended—in a completely new realm. “Do I want to be Fuchs or Fox?” she ponders. “For things that are in the public eye, in entertainment, I’ll be Fox. If I do anything for me, like go on a game show, I’ll be Fuchs.” For someone who says she’s uncomfortable with self-promotion, though, she was willing to go to great lengths to publicize the new game. “I did apply for The Golden Bachelor season 1,” she admits. “I can see now why they didn’t pick me, but they should have! I would not have been able to do all that cheesy shit. I thought it’d be something different with older people, but nope. I hate those shows.” After the success of Rock Hard 1977 in just a few months, with a second printing in the works and rumors of possible expansions, she won’t have to go to such lengths again.

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.