Battle of the Bands (aka Band Manager) First Impressions

You know, I have a really tough time finding new bands.

~Joan Jett

Battle of the Bands is a love letter to the music industry: players feel the pressure of becoming more mainstream to survive, and must navigate the uneasy balance between companionship and headcount in a touring band.

Starting with nothing but pure passion, players go on tours to win career opportunities and fans. However, tours are expensive and risky. The risk may be mitigated by cooperating with others, but then players must split the spoils, so band members must earn their place or be left out.

Early in players’ career, tours are niche; poorly promoted with obscure genres & unusual instruments (bagpipe reggae?). As the game progresses, players gain success by selling out to more mainstream music and learning how to do effective marketing. As their careers take off, the incentive to cooperate with other players fades away, leaving nothing but a desperate race for fans.

So let’s get the obvious point out the way first. The board in Battle of the Bands is a T-Shirt and the player pieces are badges… I feel this initially takes over the focus of the game and even when I asked on Facebook, “Who wants to play Battle of the Bands”, the first reply was “Whos wearing the board?” 🙂

But this isn’t a T-Shirt game, it’s a card game.

The art is that pixelated 1980s look and quite humorous if you look closely… Each player is dealt 2 random ‘Passion’ cards with the building blocks of your band’s backstory on them… I had ‘Heartbroken and ‘Talent’ and with these, you’re supposed to make your band’s backstory… we did not.

Start Player

The ‘Best Backstory’ is the official first player though which could be fun, we just went randomly by shaking the badges and dropping them.

Before gameplay, a quick note to say the other cards are shuffled into 2 piles. In the main deck, called ‘Career Cards’, these are Hype, Chops, Riffs and Lead cards in 4 different colours and valued 0-4…

The other deck is made up of ‘Fan’ cards of various values and your goal is to get to 27 fans first.

So you start the game with 2 Passion cards (These are wildcards) and can either ‘Stay Home and Practice’ (Draw a Card and end your turn) or ‘Go on Tour’ (Become the Tour Manager and Play Cards).

Going on Tour

When you go on Tour you need to fill a Row with a card of that column’s colour, using your Passion cards as Wildcards to fill any slot. Some slots (The black ones top left of the grid) will give you fans and the light grey ones will give more Career cards.

If you can’t fill a slot yourself you can ask other players to go on tour with you to hopefully fill the gaps for you. But why would they?

Well, the value of the card played will give that many cards of that type as the ‘Spoils’ that will be drafted by all Band members. Also, anyone who goes on tour can put their badge on a card and claim it as their own, as long as no one else is already in that column, I’ll explain why in a bit.

After the bottom row is filled, you can go to Stage 2 which is the same as Stage 1 but requires a Fan to complete in its own slot on the right. Stages 3 and 4 are the same.

Once players have negotiated playing cards, placing their badge and which level to stop at, cards are revealed and drafted.

Success & Failure

At this point, if the Tour fails, players take back their cards. The Tour Manager will have to Stay Home and Practice instead.

A number of Fan and Career cards are laid out face up depending on the value of the cards in their spaces. These are those ‘Spoils’ I mentioned earlier.

The Tour Manager picks first, then drafting occurs from left to right depending on which column players have their badge in. (This is why you can’t have 2 badges in the same column.)

Obviously, if you tour alone you get all the spoils.

After drafting, players take back their badge and the card it’s on, all the other cards are discarded.

The Tour Manager then discards down to 7 cards. They can also ‘Bank’ Fans by placing them on one side face up.

Once someone has 27 fans the game ends and they win.

Battle of the Bands Summary

So first the negatives. The rule book needs work but it was a beta copy so hopefully, this will be fixed before general release. The images are good but it needs more words and a bit more info on different situations. We played it slightly wrong and had a few questions while playing that the book couldn’t clarify. The designer said to email but I didn’t have a signal and the board game cafe I was in no longer offers Wifi!

The T-Shirt and Badges are fun but off-putting to some. A board option and ‘Proper’ counters when this comes to Kickstarter would be good.

Spirit

The game needs to be played in the right spirit. Like Munchkin, if everyone is nice and polite and helps out then the games just follow rails to the end. You need everyone to say “No, no one wants to tour with you” if they’re winning. I can see people ignoring that to get Fans and place second. This happened in our game. Games being played in the right spirit is one of the hardest things to get right at the table.

I’m not sure if going on your own is always better? You spend 4 cards but then draw a handful. If you have a Red ‘4’ card you draw 4 Fans and keep them all. As well as this you will draw other Career cards you can hopefully set your next turn up with.

Personally, it’s like Chinatown for me and I’m not a big negotiation game fan. I’m not mean or ‘selfish’ enough and I don’t enjoy it if that’s what the game is.

Positives

But for the Positives, unlike Chinatown, it’s fun to do the negotiating. I loved saying things like “Your Band is OK, pretty decent, but you need my Riffs… your Riffs a great, but mine are Godlike!”. Even talking about the specific things on the cards too like “Who needs Bagpipes when you can have a Harmonica?” 🙂 I enjoyed that.

I like art and ‘things’ on the cards and that each card is different. You can work it into the story of your Band or Tour and work it into your negotiations…

“Thank you, but a Saxophone isn’t the sound we’re going for in this band.”

Overall I think Battle of the Bands is good it’s just not for me. If you have a group that likes to tell stories and be a bit mean to each other you’ll love it 🙂

Jesta ThaRogue

Note: The copy of Battle of the Bands I played was a review copy. It is self-published by Sam Ballard and Ed Saperia, big thanks to them for this game.