1986. I was there, baby! Movies were better then. No, I’m not some bitter old man spouting off about ‘the good old days’ (how are the ‘80s so far behind me now?). Look at this list of movies: Aliens (instant win there), Highlander, Big Trouble In Little China, Little Shop of Horrors, Stand By Me. Come on, can’t be beat! Stephen King wrote his best books. The music made then will live forever. The Transformers cartoon was still running. I had a Commodore 64, Planet Earth’s greatest computer. So, when I heard there’s a board game based in the summer of a very fine year, I just had to take a look.
So, you’ve just graduated high school and you have one more week of summer before it’s time to head off to the real world. Last Week Of Summer combines turn programming and worker placement with a variety of mini games. Each game, players set up their town using 4 or 5 of the possible locations: Pick up a movie at the Video Store, get high scores at the Arcade, grab some Fast Food, hang at the Q-Mart, get the coolest (but not too cool) albums at the Music Store, or learn some tricks at the Skatepark. Each of these locations links 80’s theme to a classic mechanism – set collection, tile placement, market manipulation, mancala, push your luck, dice rolling, and more.
Players plan their day and then simultaneously move from place to place as they compete to make friends with the coolest kids in town, get invited to the best parties, and complete location specific goals. As you complete goals you make memories by placing cassettes on locations (these represent the songs that bring you back to those summer days). Whoever has the most cassettes at the end of the week is the winner.
The opportunity to use different elements when setting up your town should lead to different and individual playthroughs each game, and a chance to turn the game towards your own personal tastes. There’s even a solo mode where you get to play against Trust Fund Tony. He’ll try to get invites for parties, and will buy his way to friendship, so you have to keep on your toes. This is a full solo mode with minimal upkeep, run by a deck of cards which will decide where Tony will go each day as well as what he’ll do at each location.
And the cassette tokens are way too cool. In fact, I have a sudden and urgent need to dig out my old chunky Walkman with wired headphones. They were much louder back in the day. Or perhaps it’s just that my ears are knackered now…
This is live on Kickstarter right now, so head on over to the crowdfunding page and get yourself involved in a blast from the past.
About the author:
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here: www.instagram.com/positively.board
