Bebop
Designed by: Robert Hovakimyan
In Bebop, the board represents a jazz festival, the circular discs stages with musicians, and we the players are promoters, shouldered with the task of booking seats throughout the festival – and filling them with paying punters.
Each player has a bunch of tiles in their own colour (-bookings), and three dice (-customers). On your turn, you can either add a booking to the board – although you can only ever have a maximum of three open bookings – or fill one of your bookings with a customer, in which case you then take a replacement customer from the display on the board, or a random one from the bag – if it’s the latter, you roll it. You can optionally also re-roll any of your three unseated customers after placing a booking. In terms of what you do on your turn, that’s it!
However, where Bebop gets more engaging – and more complex – is in the various ways you score points. Firstly, note from the pictures that the customer dice are in various colours (families) and various musical instruments, indicating what instrument they appreciate. If you place a customer next to a group of customers from the same family, you score a point for each matching instrument in that family – no matter which player booked them there.
Secondly, whenever a stage is surrounded by customers (with the exception of the VIP spaces, which are apparently no big deal at this festival) the musicians will ‘play’. Now the players with the most connected matching symbols of the same instrument will score points: and being connected means being a member of any family that at least one member of is adjacent to the stage.
For example: a two-musician stage of piano and drums are surrounded, so they play (ie they score). The families next to the stage are red and purple, so – even though they may not be directly adjacent to the stage – any piano or drum symbols in those family will be considered in the scoring: and the player with the most piano/drum symbols will claim the matching musician from the stage.
Finally, at the end of the game players may score these musicians again: each family of the biggest group will trigger points for all players in it who own matching musicians to the customers there!
Sam says
There are also some special one-off tiles everyone gets one of, like the instant-customer tile or the Boot tile (the only one that allows you to kick someone else’s booking off the board). The challenge with Bebop isn’t the rules: each turn you do one of two actions. It’s decoding the scoring and understanding the board state and getting past the human habit of compartmentalising things: in Bebop, things cross over. It’s beautifully made and cognitively challenging and to be honest, feels more like an amoebic science project than a jazz festival, but while I enjoyed that challenge I’m not sure Bebop is a game I yearn to return to over and over. I finished it exhausted! But if it’s a little too dense for my predilections, I very much respect this kind of design: if you like it, it’ll never get old.
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Take That!
Although direct interaction is extremely limited, the passive blocking and tactical chicanery is very present.
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Fidget Factor!
While Bebop is kind of bonkers, it’s also surprisingly fast, taking about 20 minutes per player.
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Brain Burn!
It hurt me just trying to explain the scoring. But if you can get your head around that, you’re off.
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Again Again!
Not that you need it, but Bebop has several boards to explore. But the introductory game itself has so many variables, it’ll be far from ‘done’ even after multiple plays.
