In Book It!: The Pro Wrestling Promoter Card Game, players will run a wrestling promotion, touring from city to city putting on a show.
Will your promotion finish with the most reputation?
In the world of pro wrestling, the REAL cut-throat competition comes from the promoters of your favourite events! Take control of your own wrestling promotion. Choose your style, sign your wrestlers, develop local talent, boost your reputation, and sabotage your rivals! Think you’ve got what it takes to run the best pro wrestling company in the world? Well, then… BOOK IT!
Book It! Gameplay
The game starts with players choosing the style of promotion they’ll use his game. They are Strong Style, Sports Entertainment, Lucha Libre, Hardcore and Hybrid. These give you game long abilities.
Then players will draft a card from a deck of venue cards. These give you an ability for the round. For example, Memphis gives you bonus cash if you only book local talent and/or Sports Entertainers this round.
Now players take turns performing 1 of 5 actions:
The first is to sign a wrestler. Choose from 1 of the 10 laid out, pay the cost, add them to your collection and refill the available talent pool.
The second is to push a Jobber. You start with a deck of Jobbers and for $3 you can discard one and take a Journeyman card. These are basic cards, but better.
The third and fourth actions are to buy a Special Announcement card which give you a bonus or a Dirt Sheet card will hurt other players.
The final action is to pass and drop out the round. When all players pass you go to book your matches.
Players will shuffle all of their wrestlers into a deck and draw 6.
Players put these cards into 3 pairs for 3 matches. Then they draw pairs of cards to create a match until they have 5 matches.
Matches gain a bonus for being Marketable. So if two non-local (meaning not Jobbers or Journeyman) cards are paired with the same star power, they gain a bonus to their star power.
Matches also gain a bonus to their work rate if both (non-local) wrestlers are higher than 0, but the.
Further bonuses are available if the Wrestlers match type and also if the type of both the Wrestlers matches the Promotion type.
Round Scoring
In the Ticket Sales phase, players will gain money depending on the star rating of all the wrestlers in their matchups and the reputation of their promotion.
Finally the show quality phase. Here you add up the work rate of each wrestler, divide by 2, round down and add any bonuses. Do this for each match.
Players add together the total and look at a chart to see how much reputation they gain.
Players discard and non-local wrestlers booked in matches and start a new round.
At the end of 6 rounds players will turn leftover money into reputation, most reputation wins.
Theme
Yes, nailed it!
So I’m a HUGE wrestling fan. I’m 95% a WWE fan and 5% NJPW and Indy stuff. Meaning, I follow non-WWE stuff though channels like Cultaholic but I don’t tend to watch a lot.
So I know enough to know the theme and like any smarky fan, I know roughly how the business works.
The different styles of wrestler make sense. getting a bonus for having the same style of wrestler facing each other makes sense. having them in a venue that enjoys that style of wrestling makes sense.
Philadelphia SHOULD give a bonus to the ‘hardcore’ style and a penalty to ‘sports entertainment’… it just should 🙂
Setup & Rulebook
Setup is fine. Lay out some cards, deal out some others and crack on.
The rulebook… is not so good. It’s very… “Publisher new to Kickstarter”. It makes sense, but I feel ONLY if you already know how to play the game.
We referred to it A LOT during the game. It’s only a small leaflet style and yet we had disagreements over a couple of rules that could be read 2 ways… Not good.
There are how to play videos but the rulebook should ALWAYS be relied upon on it’s own.
Components & Artwork
Everything is good quality, there, that’s that done. let’s get to the fun part 🙂
The cards are all parodies of real wrestlers (and Superstars for those that aren’t “wrestlers” :))
It’s fun to go through and see who is who and pint them out.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
Teaching is OK once you know what you’re doing. The entire outline of the game is very simple.
But, that scoring phase though. The star rating is fine, count stars, gain money… easy.
But the show quality phase is not only awkward to explain, it had the other players reaching for the calculator. Could ave been smoother. Again, “Publisher new to Kickstarter”.
Book It! Summary
This is a simulation game. The closest game I can think of is The Football Game which simulates football management really well.
The theme works well and the game plays smoothly, once you work it out.
The game lasts over an hour, closer to 2 with 4 inexperienced players. But it’s good to layout your match ups like an intro to WWF in the 90s, before matches got booked on the fly like 2000’s WWE.
“Championship contender Kayley will be looking for back to back wins in consecutive shows faces the local talent Jill Starr! She sure is one to watch for the future.”
It’s fun to do but you really don’t want to be dragging the game out too long.
But good theme, fun game and if you like wrestling you’ll love this!
Jesta ThaRogue