Recently my boyfriend and I bought a fun card game called RockBand Manager, which I had the pleasure of playing over the weekend with some friends. There was a total of four of us playing, and I got really into it and had a lot of fun!
You can see the full rule book here, but I'll go over the general idea of it. The aim of the game, straight from the rule book is:
'You've hit the club scene night after night, scouting for the next act to turn the rock world upside down. You're not looking for just anybody – you need the perfect combination of attitude, talent, and unbridled rock-ability. You think you've finally found the next big thing. But they're going to need your guidance to make it to the top.'
There are three stages to the game in which you form your band, and get gigs and release albums to become famous!
So you start by recruiting your band in the Rockstar Recruitment phase. The characters are revealed and all players can use their money envelopes to bid on a maximum of one character each per turn until they form a band. I will explain the anatomy of a card (which you can see below). At the top left is each member's instrument, so your band will consist of 5 members, one for each instrument. Along the bottom are 4 numbers which will be important for getting points and awards, but also for winning things in the Career Debut stage which is explained below. The red number is the Charisma value, the second is the Talent, and the third is the Opportunism. The fourth number is the Overall Characteristic Value.
Once you have your band, you give them a name! When building my band I started accidentally getting all members with curly hair, so I tried to make all of them have curly hair, but I got one person, the guitarist, who had very straight hair. His name was Murphy. So I called my band 'Murphy and the Curly Fries!' and all of my songs were about curly fries. They were absolutely ridiculous, but I'll say more about that later.
Next is the Career Debut phase. Here is when you will start getting gigs and releasing albums. The stats shown in your character cards are important in this phase as you will be given 10 options (2 horizontal rows) on what you want to bid on as the manager of your band.
This is where you use the first three numbers at the bottom of the card. If we look at Murphy Malone as an example, he has a 3 in the Charisma section, which means if I use him to purchase something this round I can bid on Charisma cards that are up to 3 cards from the left on both rows, but because there is a 5 in the Talent section, I can bid on a Talent card up to 5 cards from the left in both rows.
If more than one player wants to bid on the same thing they will start an auction. The auction starts with cash envelopes. If this is tied, it's decided by the value for that stat on the band member. For example, Prisca and Mat, in the picture above both bid for the Garage gig in the bottom left. Both bid $2000 so this is tied. Mat wins because he has 4 Charisma value, and Prisca only has 2. If this was tied however, the winner would be either the person who is currently first player if he/she was bidding, or the person who is first to the the left of the current first player.
In this part I told my friend who also wanted to release an album, whoever wins it will have to sing their hit single. He agreed. I won. My song made no sense at all since I tried to make it up on the spot very fast and somehow ended up singing about deep fried curly women...
There are also cards that can affect other players called Opportunity Cards, for example:
but we didn't end up using those in this play through. I'm sure we could have come up with a funny story for why we were doing that though if we did!
Next is the Career Apex phase. In this one you continue to get gigs and albums, but they have more points awarded for them. At this point I would come up with already famous bands and say we were competing to play alongside them if we were all going for the same gig. It was at some point here that I sang about how sexy and hot curly fries are.
Awards are given out at the end of each stage, and at the end of the game, everyone tallies up their points to find the winner. I won by one extra point! So I had to do one final song of course! My final song was a sad one, because all the curly fries were gone. There was no melody to it, it didn't rhyme, it was just really bad. My boyfriend who was in second place asked how I won with a band like that? To which I responded 'Good management!'.
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