Jacqueline Fuchs, aka Jackie Fox — her stage name during her time as the bassist for The Runaways — has designed tabletop game Rock Hard: 1977 as a reflection of her music industry knowledge.
Jacqueline Fuchs, aka Jackie Fox — the stage name coined during her time as the bassist for The Runaways — knows a lot about the dark side of the music industry. But she also knows its joys and its potential rewards. All of that is a part of Rock Hard: 1977, a tabletop game she designed about climbing the music industry’s slippery ladder to mainstream success.
The game’s design is directly inspired by her real-life experiences in the industry, although it’s not so dark that it isn’t still a fun board game. Jackie Fox went to Gen Con in early August to demo the game and meet its many, many new fans. In a video call with Polygon this week, she told us about her longtime tabletop game obsession and her decision to make a board game of her own.
Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Polygon: So, why a tabletop game?
Jackie Fox: Well, unfortunately, I’m not sitting in the room where my games are, but if I was, you would see how much I love tabletop games. I like video games as well, but there’s that tactile dimension with tabletop that is just — it puts you in a different space, and it takes you off your screens for a while, and it’s very social in a way that doing something online isn’t.
Telling a story in a game can be difficult. How did you think about that, in terms of design and creating the characters?
I made sure these characters felt very real, that they were people that I would have known in the ’70s, and that all the flavor text on the cards — a lot of it was stuff that really happened to me. And so you can create a little story along with the help of that. It’s telling you, “Here’s what’s happening to your character,” but you’re getting to make choices. It’s essentially a Euro, but there’s an overlay of American-style games, because I wanted a strategy game that had the fun factor of, you know, that anything can happen.
How dark did you want to go? From the photos, it’s clear that instead of drugs, you have “candy” in the game, and I was also wondering about the age range you had in mind for players.
Well, I always knew that candy — I shouldn’t say I always knew that candy wasn’t going to be drugs. I knew early on. You know, I’ve had friends who have struggled with needing to work out really hard every day, to the point where it was detrimental. There’s gambling, there’s sex addiction, there’s just the need for attention. I mean, we get these things that we rely on, and maybe they even start out healthy, but at some point, this little switch in your brain gets flipped on, and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. And I wanted to reflect that in the game.
The game is appropriate for 14-year-olds up. I mean, you know, it’s more about sexual innuendo that the age restriction is there, instead of the candy.
That makes sense. 14 and up is the age range of wanting that fantasy of being in a rock band, but perhaps needing to know a bit more about what that’s really like.
Yeah. And just gameplay mechanics as well. I’m not sure 12-year-olds would want to sit still for this. Some would.
So it’s like, use your judgment.
On the last day [of Gen Con], this family came, and there was a 10-year-old there, and I went up to them and said, “Hey, I think you should know, there are some cards that maybe are a little adult.” And they went, “Yeah, he’s fine. He does a podcast.”
Wow, kids today! So I’m curious, since you love tabletop games and video games, if you want to talk about some of the inspirations for this game.
One of the games that really influenced me in terms of wanting to have amps that actually had dials that you could play with was a game from Plaid Hat Games called Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein, and in that one you’re building a Frankenstein monster and trying to bring it to life. It’s also worker placement. It’s got a kind of dark theme. Actually, it’s got a very dark theme, but it has little spinner dials that you’re using to track your stats on. And I just thought it was fun. I mean, it gave that mad scientist feel.
