Designer Diary: Rock Hard 1977
By Jackie Fox
Rock Hard came about as the result of a common situation for board game groups.
My regular game group had five people. Usually someone wouldn't be available, leaving us at three or four most of the time — but every once in a while, all five of us would show up, then we would all sit and stare at my 100+ game collection trying to find a game that we were all willing to play. One of us strongly preferred heavy Euros but disliked anything involving negotiation or bidding, another preferred lighter games, and almost everyone but me hated area control.
I'll play almost anything, but if there's too much downtime that doesn't involve planning my own move and I'm not engaged in what the other players are doing, I generally won't like the game. I'll start itching to pick up my phone and check email during other people's turns, and for me that defeats the whole purpose of playing board games, which is partly to give myself a break from all those screens.
I wondered why it was so hard to find a game that ticked all the boxes for me: the strategy of a good Euro; the "fun" factor of an American-style game; true integration of theme and mechanisms; quick turns even at full-player count. It was at that moment I decided to design the game I wanted to play.
Are You Ready to Rock?
I am very much a "top-down" designer. For me, while the mechanisms are super important, theme comes first.
I have led an interesting life, to say the least. Perhaps nothing has been more interesting (at least to other people) than my having been the bass player in the "Famous Five" version of the all-female rock band The Runaways.
Worker placement is my favorite game mechanism, and the music industry is a natural fit. Everyone can wrap their heads around what rock musicians do: interviews, gigs, songwriting, making records, etc. These were natural action-selection spaces that would make it easier to learn and remember the game.
And, of course, my game had to accommodate five players with little downtime between turns and a lot of engagement in what the other players were doing.
With all that in mind, Rock Hard sprang into my head almost fully formed. I grabbed a notebook and started writing, keeping in mind the experience I wanted to create for players: what it's like to be a fledgling rock musician trying to break into the big time.
Why 1977?
1977 was a watershed year in music in which a variety of styles of rock music all co-existed and flourished, from what we now think of as classic rock to glam to funk and early punk and metal. Even disco was still around.
It's also a period people often feel they missed out on. "Cancel culture" was far in the future, and creative people were pushing boundaries in every form of artistic expression. In music, the era would come to be defined as that of "sex, drugs and rock and roll".
From a gameplay perspective, setting the game in the 1970s also eliminated the complications of later technologies such as music videos, Napster (early unpaid music streaming), social media, and YouTube. It streamlined the choices you could make and left those things for later expansions or standalone games.
Jackie in the studio in the '70s.
The Basics
There was still plenty to deal with in 1977. First and foremost, being a musician wasn't cheap, so I knew you'd have to work a "day job" until you could support yourself with your music. I also knew from the start that my game would have day, night and "after hours" phases.
As a musician, your life is defined by the clock. During the day, you rehearse and conduct business. At night, you mostly play gigs. And when the show is over, you hang out, have fun, and meet people, and in the era before home recording was common, you tried to get into a studio to record a demo on the cheap.
I spread the jobs out across the various phases, with pay on each averaging $2, but some being swingier and potentially more rewarding (like working on commission) and some being salaried and more reliable. Some had limitations like a demanding boss who could change when you had to work, and some had perks like free studio time if you were a recording engineer. I wanted each job to feel real.
And I knew that a big part of the game would revolve around managing when to blow off work: three strikes, and the boss would tell you to take a hike. Lose your job too soon, and you wouldn't have enough money to hire crew and pay your manager. Keep it too long, however, and someone else would get that record contract first.
At the same time, there would be things that the industry wanted you to do. You'd score fame (how the game tracks points) if you did those things best or first. These bonuses would change from game to game so that no two would play alike.
You'd also have personal goals that only you could score. Sometimes they'd synch up with the public bonuses; sometimes you'd have to choose between them or hire a manager who could help you do both.
I also knew you were going to need a player mat to keep track of things and that it was going to be in the form of an amplifier with knobs you could actually turn to track your stats. More on that later.
The Darker Side of the '70s
While I wanted the game to focus on the sheer fun factor of the late '70s, I also wanted to acknowledge in some small way that the '70s rock scene could be hard for anyone who wasn't straight, white, and male.
As a woman, I faced prejudice that's hard to imagine nowadays. The review of my band's second album in Creem magazine (a huge rock magazine at the time) started with the sentence "These bitches suck" and went downhill from there.
And although David Bowie, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and The New York Dolls had already gone a long way toward making androgyny acceptable — the word "non-binary" wasn't in common use then — that was mostly because they still read as male. Non-gender-conforming people weren't always treated well. Musicians who people thought "looked gay", whether or not they actually were, often got booed on stage and threatened with violence when off it.
In actuality, in the '70s all types of people played clubs in major cities. I wanted the characters in the game to look more like my friends and less like my period record collection.
The ten characters I created are loosely based on combinations of people I knew or know, though changed to reflect a diversity of characters who play one of five different instruments (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, or vocals) and are one of three different genders (male, female, or androgynous). Each has a unique ability that gives them a slight edge in certain situations. By the time we emerged from the self-isolation of 2020, I knew these characters better than the people who'd inspired them.
While I was never going to include the rougher edges of the era, gender was definitely going to play a role. It became less important to the game as it evolved, but my thinking about it resulted in one of the more important mechanisms in the game.
Let's Have That Talk About Candy
One of the first gender differences that occurred to me was that women almost never had to pay for drugs in the '70s. Men had a higher tolerance, and androgynous people better situational awareness.
But while drugs were the original inspiration for candy, they quickly morphed into something less specific as I realized that drugs weren't the only thing that got people pumped. It could be sex or gambling or the adoration of ever-bigger crowds. It could be video games or shoplifting or lying and getting away with it. It could be actual candy. (The book "Sugar Blues" had come out in 1975 and made a strong argument that sugar was as addictive as nicotine or heroin.)
So candy became whatever, in the infamous words of The Rolling Stones, gets you through your busy day. It was a thematic way to give players the ability to gain extra actions in a game in which you usually get to do only one thing per turn.
But candy had to carry some risk because with any of these things you're always pushing your luck if you do it too often. You never know when that little switch in your brain is going to get tripped and that thing — whatever it is — becomes something you can no longer live without. It isn't going to happen the first time you do it. If you're careful or lucky, that switch may never get flipped at all.
It's risky behavior, however, and the more of it you do, the greater the risk becomes. I represented this with a stat called "craving", which would increase by one every time you consumed candy. You'd then roll a d6 to see whether you hit at least that number and satisfied your craving. If not, you'd need to spend some time recovering.
Obviously, you couldn't overdo candy the first time you used it, but your odds got worse every time your craving went up. It was a perfect representation of the push-your-luck aspect of the '70s — a small part of it to be sure, but definitely there.
In my first version of the game, candy was hard to get, and if you got a bad roll, you paid for it by having to spend the next round recovering. It was too punishing, especially in the edge case when you drew the one "sugarless" card in the deck and didn't even get any extra actions. After seeing how players reacted, I realized it was okay to sacrifice theme a little in order to minimize negative gameplay experiences.
I did this by putting an extra +1 action card into the "Sugar Rush" deck while reducing the punishment for a bad roll to losing a single action at the beginning of the next round. I also threw in some cards and abilities that could mitigate bad die rolls.
These changes took on additional importance when the game eventually got reduced from twelve rounds to nine, making every action count. Losing an action was still bad, but not so devastating that you couldn't still win. In the end, the mechanism felt quite balanced, yet still thematic.
Mona's prototype art for Kimmy Kim.
Making a Prototype
It's said that designers don't need to spend a lot of time and money on their prototypes.
I never got that memo.
I ended up spending a LOT of time on Rock Hard. Part of that was because I had never learned Photoshop; part because I didn't understand that you don't need anything fancy; and part because I was afraid to put my design in front of other people until I was sure it wouldn't "break".
By the time I had a game that wouldn't break and a prototype that looked halfway decent, Covid-19 hit and we went into isolation.
I tried to make the best possible use of my time in self-isolation by playing the game some one hundred times on my own at every different player count and with as many different combinations of characters as I could. Surprisingly, I never got sick of the game.
Part of that was down to the great temporary character art drawn for me by Mona Shafer Edwards, one of the top courtroom artists in Los Angeles. She literally cranked out the characters I had envisioned overnight.
I also entertained myself by using the zombies from Pandemic Legacy as a stand-in for the roadie tokens. That still cracks me up, and I'm sure our former crew can relate.
And finally, designer Geoff Englestein generously gave me tips on using icons instead of text on my game board. That took my board from one with a ton of overwhelming verbiage to something that looked like an actual game board.
But while the board was obviously important, the critical element for me was still the player mats.
An early version of the Rock Hard game board
The game board after the first big overhaul
The Player Mats
I got the idea of using amplifiers to track stats after playing Dan Blanchett's Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein. There was something satisfying about the 3D look the spinners gave the player boards and how much they added to the feeling of being a mad scientist. I wanted to take that tactile interaction a step further and give players the satisfaction of cranking their amps to 11.
Only...how do you actually make amps with knobs?
I tried a lot of different things, from water bottle caps to replacement knobs for video game controllers. Nothing worked.
Then one night while putting on lip balm, it hit me: Chapstick caps. Turns out they come in all different colors, and you can buy them in bulk on Etsy for a price that isn't too awful.
While it wasn't a perfect solution — no type of glue works on polyethylene for long — the caps did prove that the idea was feasible and wouldn't be prohibitively expensive...and it was the wow factor that got people's attention.
Selling the Game
As I noted above, my Photoshop skills were pretty non-existent when I started designing Rock Hard. A friend found me a template that looked like a '70s concert poster, and while I wasn't crazy about the color scheme at first, the longer I looked at it, the more it grew on me.
I read everything I could find about sell sheet design. The one thing that stuck out was that I needed to answer the question: "What makes this game unique?" I thought about it and realized that a big part of the answer to that question was me.
It felt super awkward selling my game on that basis, but I knew that because of my history, it would grab people's attention.
Once I had a sell sheet I was happy with, I plunked fake coffee stains on the "poster" and stuck it to a digital wall with a pushpin and some tape, slightly ripped and off-kilter. It was a bit rough, but it stood out.
The First Major Changes
Originally I had two "after hours" decks: You could have a backstage encounter, which improved your reputation, or you could hang out and gain a random benefit. Things basically just happened to your character, and the first publishers who looked at the game at Pax Unplugged were adamant that players should have more agency over what their characters do.
I redesigned the "after hours" phase on the flight home from PaxU by making backstage into just one of five different venues where you could hang out, adding an element of set collection. Four of the venues were likely to grant you a particular type of benefit (though the precise benefit wasn't guaranteed — hat tip to Dead of Winter). The fifth gave you no benefit, but could stand in as a "wild" for set-collection purposes.
That Pesky "First Player" Problem
In Rock Hard, going first in a given round is a huge advantage. It means that for an entire round, no spaces are going to be blocked to you unless an event card makes them unavailable.
My initial design had a "Go To Bed Early" space that let you use an "after hours" action to take the first player token for the next round, then play would proceed clockwise from them. Players didn't like this much, especially if they were seated to the right of someone using the space aggressively. Plus, it cost an action to use.
I played around early on with having the first player token rotate clockwise to keep things simple, but it made planning ahead too hard. I then tried mixing up the player order by letting you get in line for the bar or the bathroom to go first (no pun intended) next round and taking your "after hours" actions when you were through. This change got me closer, though it still didn't solve the advantage that went to whoever went first in round 1.
Enter Devir
It was at this point that I brought the game to Devir.
They weren't an obvious choice. Aside from the fact that they usually work with European designers, their "family plus" games are typically language-independent, which Rock Hard is not.
But Devir is known for strong and diverse themes, and those player boards in Lacrimosa just sang to me. I knew Devir would be able to bring my amplifiers to life. It didn't hurt that the Devir team are also die-hard rock-and-rollers and that they thought they could get everything ready in time for Gen Con 2024, which was super-fast.
The tight schedule meant I'd be doing a lot more additional work than I'd planned for, however.
Late Changes to the Game
One of the biggest changes Devir asked for was a game that was both shorter AND more complex. These two things don't normally go together. In my original version of the game, you started with nothing but $1 and a candy token and played for twelve rounds. Working was important, and there was a difficult choice early on as to whether to spend your first paycheck on a demo tape or a manager.
The solution I came up with was to start you several months in. Your base stats would start at 2 instead of 0, you'd already have some notable life experiences, and most importantly, you'd have a manager, which you'd select in reverse player order, thereby balancing out the advantage of going first in round 1 and solving my first-player problem.
Another smart change Devir made was to remove the life experience tokens and place the icons for life experience directly on the "after hours" cards. That saved on production costs, meaning the game could sell for a lower price, something we all considered important.
More Cowbell, er, Cards!
Devir did, however, want more cards – lots of them. I doubled the number of cards so that the "after hours" decks would never run out during the game. Devir also asked for more variety in the bonuses. To do so, I divided the bonuses into three types that correlated roughly to what you were trying to achieve during each during phase and created eight in each category.
While I was at it, I added more personal goals and had people draw three, keep two. This combination of bonuses and goals made every game play out differently and added more tension between the two while still keeping the game shorter.
We also added a spot for random gigs of the type you wouldn't normally play, except that they usually paid better. At first, they might be bar mitzvahs or frat parties, but eventually you might get invited to play at parties in the hills and, after getting better known, on TV and at festival slots. These random gigs would earn fewer points but have greater benefits than you could otherwise get — and unlike regular shows, which would have limited slots, anyone could play a random gig.
There's No Such Thing as Too Much Flavor
The last change we made — and the one that almost gave me a meltdown — was to add flavor text to everything. This was very last minute, so I cribbed from things that had happened to my friends and me over the years I spent in and hanging around the music industry.
I created so much flavor text so fast — I'm talking hundreds of cards in one night — I didn't have time to think about it too much. Without the time to edit, what popped out was much funnier than the few I wrote early on. Hopefully, people will find the sheer absurdity and the knowledge that most of it actually happened amusing.
The One Change That Didn't Make It
Devir had a cool idea at one point. Since the knobs went to 11, one more than on most amps, why not make it harder to push them from 10 to 11?
Thematically, the '70s way to get that last little bit of volume was with an overdrive pedal. I introduced overdrive tokens and required players to discard one whenever they wanted to push any stat from 10 to 11.
It was a great idea, but proved to be a bit too much to pull off in a nine-round game. But who knows? Maybe the overdrive tokens will make an appearance in an expansion someday.
Instead, we decided to reward players with extra cash if they increased a stat that was already maxed out. Thematically this made sense as maxed-out stats would mean you were at the top of your game and therefore making more money...and since money converts to points at game's end, this change worked. You'd still be more incentivized to try to hit other goals, but at least you'd always have something to do at the end of the game that could make a difference.
The Art
This was probably the most challenging part of bringing Rock Hard to life.
We all agreed that the right artist for the characters and cover was Spanish artist Jennifer Giner. I urge people to check out her art on Instagram. She has a lot of followers for a reason.
Jennifer, however, is young. She wasn't even born in the '70s, and she isn't a musician. She had to go through a crash course on '70s style as well as the workings of rock-and-roll instruments, all while she was moving and attending conferences to sell art.
I had only one "conversation" with Jennifer as she doesn't speak English and my high school Spanish is limited. I managed to say "mas grande que la vida" (larger than life) and "sucio" (dirty), but I had no idea how to say things like "In the seventies, we flowed", so I sent a lot of photos of '70s artists to my editor David Esbri at Devir, who ended up being the conduit between us.
The process was frustrating at times, but the results were so worth it. The artwork is stunning. Making it even more amazing is that Jennifer did both the characters and the cover as original works in watercolor.
Seriously, I've watched time-lapse videos of Jennifer painting characters, and I honestly can't imagine her creating images as complex as the ones in the game this way. One serious mistake, and the picture is ruined — and yet she created ten characters (eleven if you count my promo card) and one simply gorgeous box.
Jennifer Giner's final art for Kimmy
The last decision was the color scheme for the board. By 1977, fashion in music was moving toward the aesthetic of punk and metal. Metallic colors were big, as was black and white and bright colors such as red and turquoise.
But people have an idea of what the '70s look like, and even though it tends to be based on the early '70s and late '60s, we took a cue from the band Nazareth's 1976 album "Close Enough for Rock and Roll" and went with the color scheme people associate with the '70s: avocado green, harvest gold, and warm orange/red.
So...Are You Ready to Rock?
I've already gone on too long here, kind of like Tom Petty (RIP, friend) as an opening act. There's so much more I could write about this journey, but now it's your turn to take the spotlight. If you have any questions, pop them into the forums below and I'll try to answer.
In the meantime – long live rock!
