Chops Review
Review by David Lent
3 Headed Giant by Quirky Engine Entertainment’s games have some really unique themes such as Eyeball Boxing, Trash Wars, etc. They asked me if I would be willing to review their rock n roll game Chops. This immediately intrigued me since I’ve never played a rock n roll board game before. I looked Chops up online and saw that guitar picks are one of the components. No other board game has ever used guitar picks, so I told them I would love to review this game.
In this 2-6 player game your goal is to put together a rock band and play gigs in order to get cash and buzz. You have to be careful though, because opposing bands will try to trip you up and some of the venues are really dangerous. Band members can get injured or even killed at some of them.
The components are all really nice in this game. First, the rulebook is 15-pages, full-color and easy to understand. The cards have a humorous tone to them and represent band members, specialized musical instruments, venues, amp-ups and rivalry cards. Buzz is represented by guitar pick tokens and that’s a great component for a rock n roll game. The board is mounted and has places for money, venues, a musical instrument store and a place for musicians to hang out until they are hired. Last, the game includes paper money. I don’t have an issue with paper money and neither did any of my play-testers. However, there are people online who complain about any game that has paper money due to their hatred for Monopoly. I can assure them that this game is nothing like Monopoly and I’m sure they would like Chops if they tried it.
To setup the game, you place all the cash in its appropriate places on the board. Next, you deal 4 venues onto the street section of the board and give each player 5 cards. If any play has a fate card, he randomly puts it into the deck and draws a replacement. Each player then gets $500.00 and the starting player is chosen.
During a player’s turn he gets 3 actions. The first regular action is playing a gig (only once per turn unless a card tells you otherwise). Each gig requires a certain chops rating to play it. You add up your musician and specialized instrument chops rating and if it equals the requirement you can play the gig unless it has an additional requirement such as, no band members may have higher than a certain chops rating. Gigs usually pay cash and buzz. However, sometimes you have to roll a dice first to see what random effect happens. Sometimes, the random effects are really bad. After you play a gig you keep the gig card and replace it with one from the deck.
Hiring a musician can be done from your hand or the hang. You have to pay the musician’s hire rate to do so. Musicians have baggage, which are special rules that can affect your whole band. In addition, some musicians refuse to play at certain venues. You may not have more than 5 members in your band though.
Amp-up or rivalry card can be played as an action and they have special effects. Rivalry cards do bad things to your opponent.
If a rivalry card has been played on your band, you can smash one of your musician’s instruments to remove it. This hurts though, because it costs money to buy another instrument.
You can use an action to buy another standard instrument later if you have a spare action and $200.00. This will happen a lot if you like to break instruments during gigs.
If you don’t want to put a musician in your hand into your band, you can put him/her into the hang and draw a card. Musicians never go to the discard pile directly from your hand.
Musicians play better with specialized instruments so you can purchase one from your hand or music store. They add their chops rating to the musician who is using it.
If you need cash you can pawn one of your specialized instruments.
There are also free actions such as playing free-play cards, destroying one of your musician’s instruments during a gig to get one buzz and selling out by trading buzz for cash. Free actions can be played on anyone’s turn. Please note you must always draw up to 5 cards immediately when your hand falls below 5 cards.
If a player desperately needs cash, he can forego his standard three actions and skip his turn. This will give him $100 + $50 for each of his band members.
The game continues until the last gig card is placed on the street and then buzz points are tallied. You get additional buzz points at this point for meeting certain criteria such as playing the most gigs or having 5 band members with different instruments. The winner is whoever ends the game with the most buzz.
The gameplay for chops involves trying to move the musicians you need into and out of your band to play at the venues you need to. You can’t have musicians with high chop ratings the whole game because some venues only allow musicians under a certain rating. In addition, you may not want to play the venues with the highest payouts because most of these have bad random effects that can happen. You also want to use your rivalry cards at the right time to trip up other bands. In addition, you may want to consider occasionally destroying one of your own instruments during a gig to get an extra buzz point. Winning this game involves have the right musicians at the right time, playing the right venues and tripping up your opponent as often as possible.
What do I think of Chops? It’s a heck of a lot of fun and the theme is fantastic. The game play has sufficient strategy and it plays quickly. This isn’t one of those games where you want the game to end before it actually does. In addition, the plethora of different band members, venues and specialized instrument ensure that no two games will be alike.
Buy your own copy here.
See the components in the unboxing video below: