Bebop

Bebop is a tile placement game about a jazz music fair. You are ticket sellers trying to book the right seats for customers who enjoy specific performances - piano, brass (trumpets) or percussion (drums). I find the link between theme and mechanism a little weak, but still, it’s nice to see a music fair setting, which is not something you see often. This being a tile placement game means there is much board play and spatial element. 

The board area you use is adjusted based on the number of players. There are stages scattered around the board, and a stage can have between one to three instruments, indicating the performance types. The performance at a stage starts when available spaces around it all have seats placed, and all these seats are filled with customers. A performance is how you score points. 

Let’s first look at the two things you can do in this game. On your turn you either place a seat from your stock, or you place a customer (a die) from your hand of three. Placing a seat means reserving a spot next to a stage. You are securing a spot so that in future you can place a customer die. Customer dice come in many colours. Dice have three types of faces - piano, trumpet and drums. This means the performance type the customer likes. You only have three dice in hand. Whenever you place a seat you can reroll one customer, potentially changing it to another icon. Whenever you place a customer, you get to claim a new one from a pool. All this stuff you do are related to how you will score points from performances. Let’s talk about that. 

When a performance happens, you look at who has seated the most right customers next to the performer, i.e. the disc with the instrument icon. Only these players will score points. If a performance involves two instruments, you check for majority for each instrument separately. The number of matches is not limited to customers seated next to the performer. Customers of the same colour who are connected form families. The whole family is considered to be next to a performer, as long as just one member is seated next to that performer. And this is how the colours of customers are important. You also score points when you seat a customer with their family. 

Point values of performances drop over time. There is a race to score the early performances because they are worth more points. These tracks below show the point values of performances, which drop one notch after every performance. 

Whenever you manage to score at a performance, you gain a token of the instrument type. This is used at end game scoring. At the end of the game, the largest families in each colour score points. If you are involved in some of these families, you score those family members based on these tokens you have collected, matching the family member icon of course. 

Some seats in your stock have special powers, which spice things up a little. One can be used to replace an opponent’s seat. You only have one of these so you want to keep it for the most important situation. One seat allows you to immediately place another. One seat lets you seat a customer immediately.

In Bebop you compete to score performances. Fully enclosing a stage by yourself can take much effort. Not all spaces around a stage are mandatory, but still, there is some effort needed. So sometimes you hope others will come and collaborate with you so that the performance can start earlier and thus give you more points. You may end up having to share points. Or if your opponent has more matching customers, then you get nothing. One tactic you can use to delay your opponents from scoring a performance is butting in with a seat and then delay seating a customer. The performance won’t start if there is still an empty seat. 

The families are an interesting additional layer to the competition. In the short term, they give you extra points whenever you add to a family. Multiple players can have seats used by the same family. You will try to manipulate families so that you get involved in the largest ones by game end. They will give you points. In addition to the tactical wins, you must position yourself for the game end scoring as well. 

Bebop is a light to mid weight strategy game big in the spatial aspect. If you feel like playing something with more board play and not doing another everyone-on-their-own-player-board Eurogame, you can give this a go. 

Note Flash

Note Flash is a simple card game designed by Malaysian students for a local fundraising event. This is certainly not a gamer’s game, which means this is not of interest to 99% of the readers of this blog. For me, it is interesting to see people who are not gamers design games because they will come up with ideas which are different. They have fresh eyes which I do not have.

Note Flash challenges you to identify musical notes accurately and quickly. This is a solo game which can also be played competitively between two players. You have a time limit of 4 minutes and a stack of 46 cards. The front side of a card shows a musical note, and the back shows what note it is, i.e. the answer. Before you start a game, you set up seven columns, C, D, E, F, G, A and B. Once the timer starts, you start assigning cards to the right column as quickly and correctly as you can. 

The game ends when you assign all cards, or when the timer runs out. You have a base of 50 points. You earn more points if you beat the clock. You lose points per card remaining if you run out of time. You also take a heavy penalty for each incorrectly identified note. To check whether you get all of the notes right, you simply flip them all over. Each card back is coloured based on what note it is, so you can quickly check correctness at a glance. 

If you want to do a two-player game, you use the other side of the column header cards. The time limit is shortened to 2 minutes, and each player gets 23 cards instead of 46. 

This game is a good exercise for music sight-reading. It serves an educational purpose. It is certainly something different from what gamers usually play. 

I have started work on one game design which is related to music. It is a real-time game about beats. I never got very far with it. I worry it might be too complicated for the average casual gamer who does not know music, yet too easy for anyone who knows music. It's certainly an interesting topic to get into - designing a game related to music.