I’ve owned Rock Hard 1977 for nearly a year. How well has it held up?
Variation
There are quite a few card decks, which means they’re each limited in size: some of the variable gigs, and especially the managers, inevitably turn up again from one game to the next. (And other elements too, though less often: during each of my first three plays I randomly draw the female drummer, and she had a job driving a truck.) But none of the cards gives such a huge advantage or drawback as to make a game feel especially good or bad when it comes up, so it doesn’t matter that it’s one you’ve seen before.
So far I’ve only found two fairly reliable paths to victory: the “obvious” one in which you record a demo tape, get a record deal, and work up the chain of venues while improving your skills, and the “bad boy” one in which you ignore all that, party hard, consume the entire candy production of a medium-sized city, and try to pick up good luck after hours. Each of these can work, and neither is reliably a winner. I’m sure there are still more routes to find, certainly there are other things to try, and there’s enough randomness that committing to a strategy in advance is unlikely to work; like many games I enjoy, this is one in which you have to adapt to the randomness of the environment as well as to what your opponents are doing. Indeed, in play this game can feel like more of a series of individual competitions against an uncaring world than it is a head-to-head duel of musicians; sometimes you’ll take a placement spot someone else wanted, but mostly you’re in this together against the old people who just don’t understand what rock music is all about—and of course the record companies.
I would like to see more use made of the individual musicians’ traits; several of the aspiring rockers have unique powers, but details like which instrument you play are only rarely relevant to gameplay. Indeed, it would be nice to see some element of “building a band” rather than just paying to recruit anonymous backing players; but of course that wasn’t a design goal, and there’s a limit to what one game can cover and still be played in a reasonable time.
Components
All the pieces are still in good shape; I don’t sleeve cards, and they’ve held up well to repeated shuffles. What looked like some scruffiness on the laser-cut tokens turned out to be a slightly unusual backing sheet. My main concern was the amplifier knobs becoming loose, as they’re used to track your various stats and need to stay firmly where they’re put, but this doesn’t seem to have been a problem.
The rulebook is good for learning, but I find it hard to use as a reference; it’s very wordy, and explains things well, but that means it takes a while when looking for a specific detail to drill down to the place where it’s stated.
Enthusiasm
Probably I have more enthusiasm for the game than the rest of my regular players do. To a serious heavyweight gamer, it may be too simple and too random. For a casual gamer it can seem intimidating: too big and with too many options to choose from. I’m somewhere in the middle, and it’s a good match for the sort of game I’m often in the mood for playing.
For me this is a game a bit like the older versions of Arkham Horror: you can play it just for the mechanics, but that’s pretty dull. To enjoy this game fully, engage with the theme: take the prompts that the random cards and dice give you and try to tell a story with it. How did Shere Darling go from drummer by day, long-haul truck driver by night, to a star who could fill the Carter Stadium? Well, her big break came when someone asked her to park their car…
Summary
This game remains solidly in the upper tiers of my collection: I may not get it out to play every week, but I start missing it after a while without a game. No regrets about purchasing, and it’s definitely not getting moved on any time soon.
Scores
Overall Score 80%
- Artwork ★★★
- Complexity ★★
- Replayability ★★★
- Player Interaction ★★★★
- Component Quality ★★★★
You might like
- Dripping with theme, designer claims that not all the random events happened to her personally.
- Clear if over-wordy rulebook
- Straightforward mechanics
You might not like
- When it comes down to it it’s just worker placement.
- Individual musicians’ traits don’t matter much.
- Can feel quite random.
