Rock ‘N’ Roll The Music Biz Game is another of those charity shop finds that looked interesting enough to come home with us, but then sat in the cupboard for years before we finally got round to pulling it out and playing it. Even just opening the box though you’re struck by the design work that has gone into this game.
The Look
There is no playing board in Rock ‘N’ Roll. In fact there aren’t even any playing pieces. Instead you open the box to a very neatly organised playing arena. Pride of place is given to a spinning album, made of cardboard with a plastic record arm over it. Also in there are an array of card cassettes which give you a variety of situation cards that you refer to throughout the game.
The instructions are printed on the back of a large concert ticket (remember though from before we all went digital!) and rather than bank notes all payments in the game are made by cheque.Published back in 1988 this is a game that absolutely screams of its time. It’s a wonderful retro throwback to those of us that were music fans in the 80s and 90s as all these novelty bits really added to the game’s overall feel.
Aim of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Game
The aim of this game is relatively simple – to make as much money as possible by moving through the 5 grooves on the spinning album. Each one of these grooves represents one album release.
How to play
With the absence of a board or playing pieces you might be wondering how to play Rock ‘N’ Roll. Each player is allocated a different coloured gold record marker piece. Initially all these are placed in the slot in the box denoting that the player is on the first groove of the record. As players move to the inner grooves their gold record marker piece is moved to the corresponding space in the box.
On their turn each player spins the spinning record. Before doing so they line up the tone arm of the record player so that it is sitting over the groove that they are on. Once the record has been spun the needle of the tone arm points to a space on the track denoting what they have “landed on”.
It could be that you land on a RADIO space when then allows you to spin the Radio Hit Single Spinner. This tells you how well your record is doing and you earn money accordingly.
Most of the spaces on the records grooves are situations and then the player must take a cassette situation card.
Cassette Situation Cards
In an attempt to be as realistic to life in the music business as possible the idea of the situation cards is that they are supposed to show all the different people that you have to interact with for a record or act to be successful. Depending on what you land on you could be picking up one of the following cassette situation cards:
- Artist
- Agent
- Publisher
- Record Company
- Manager
- Accountant
- Merchandiser
- Lawyer
- Everyone Else
The situation cards could tell you what to do or require you to pay something, or even to collect more money.
Moving between record grooves
The final type of space on the record grooves is the GO TO NEXT ALBUM space. This allows a player to move to the next groove on the record, but only if they can afford the same $150,000 in recording costs. If you don’t have the money you can take a bank loan, or see if another player will loan it to you. The bank offers 0% interest, but you can’t have a bank loan outstanding to move up any further, and you can only borrow from the bank three times in a game.
Retiring
The game continues until a player retires. To do this they have to land on the retire space on the fifth album groove. When they do so they could actually choose to delay retirement if they think they need to earn more money first. You need to remember here that the winner of the game is not the first to retire, but the one that makes the most money from their music career.
Upon deciding to retire you get one final spin of the Radio Hit Single Spinner which will decide how big a retirement bonus you will receive – if you get one at all!
When retirement has happened all players stop and count up their cheques before a winner is declared.
What we thought of Rock ‘N’ Roll The Music Biz Game
We played this game with a couple of friends of a similar vintage to ourselves and our first impression was that we really liked it. The spinning record was a novel idea and we all liked the cassette cards and the idea of being paid by cheque. As the game went on it did begin to drag a little bit though.
The spinning album was quite hard to spin and having to move the needle arm all the time (due to us all being on different grooves) was a bit of a faff. Whilst the cassette cards were a nice idea the wording on them was a bit poor and we found that the denominations of cheques wasn’t quite right for what you actually needed to do with money in the game.
I’ve read that the game was invented by two music business pros and it shows a bit. There are definitely some nice touches in there and we really liked the retro feel of it, but I’m not sure we’d play it again.
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