Interview: The Runaways bassist Jackie Fox on her new tabletop game

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. And so anything you can do with the components that really drives home the theme in a thematic game, I love.

I think maybe it comes from growing up with games like, where we had the Pop-O-Matic bubble? Kind of toy-like. I mean, most people grow up playing board games as kids, and they really like them, and then, you know, life gets in the way, a lot of the time. And I wanted this to be a game that could pull back in people who love rock and roll and maybe loved games as a kid, and wouldn’t be totally intimidating, and it would in some ways feel kind of comforting and in a way, familiar.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Do you feel like it’s also maybe educational, especially for people who were born after the ’70s and don’t know what the music industry was like?

I think there are definitely things that are educational. The fact that I’m who you are. [laughs]

I mean, it is meant to to evoke an era, but it’s not — I mean, I think everybody has an idea of what a rock star does. So for me, when you can incorporate theme into a game really well, it makes it easier to learn, easier to remember, and easier to teach. And that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted something where you wouldn’t have to focus on the entire game board when you start playing. You could just look at pretty much one third of the board, and all you had to worry about at that time is that one third, and then you worry about the next third, and finally, the next third after that. And after a few rounds, when you’ve gotten your head wrapped around it, you can start thinking ahead. So it’s a game that you just have a lot of fun with. The first few times you’re entertained by the flavor text; you’re learning how to play. And then after you’ve played it a few times, a deeper strategy starts to reveal itself. And then eventually, hopefully there will be expansions that increase the complexity and and get at a little more where I had originally intended, which was really a hobbyist game.

What are some of your dream expansions?

Yeah, the first one — instead of just being able to hire an independent promo person, when you hire them, you’re getting payola tokens, and you’re using that to move up the hot tracks chart. So there will be an area that has area majority scoring, and there’ll be some other things you can do with the public goals that also involve area majority. And eventually I’d like to add in things that represent merch and music publishing and have other avenues to win, instead of just getting bigger and getting to the stadium and getting your record deal, et cetera. And then, if it all keeps going well, we’ll do a standalone that takes the characters into the ’80s, and we have video now.

Yeah, you’d have to make music videos!

Yeah! So it’s fun. I mean, the music industry is such a natural fit with worker placement.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

In play-testing, was there anything that surprised you about how people play the game?

Well, the only thing that surprised me was COVID. I had to do a lot of play-testing by myself because I couldn’t go and watch people in person. I mean, you can do things in Tabletop Simulator. But it’s not the same as being in the room with them and seeing where people are engaged and where they’re checking out. And people kind of had — I mean, the big thing that changed was, at beginning, candy was very hard to get, and everybody who played it said, “We want more candy.” And I was kind of like, you know what? It’s got a built-in break anyway, because if you push your luck too hard, you’re going to get hit, and you’re going to lose that vital action. When we cut it to nine rounds from 12, suddenly even losing one action became a little more punishing, but from a gameplay perspective, sitting out one turn isn’t that bad. Sitting out an entire round, which was what originally happened, was not fun.

There’s always that push and pull of players wanting more of an in-game resource, huh?

As long as you are willing to do some sub-optimal moves after hours in order to occasionally be first player in the next round, you’ll do fine. It’s really your character abilities and your manager abilities are there to help you, so lean into them. Don’t lean exclusively on them, but lean into them.

Any other tips?

Well, I’m a bass player, part of the rhythm section, so I will just tell people this is a game about timing. You have to time things.

You also have to be willing to roll with the punches, because stuff will happen in this game. You know, if you don’t like randomness, there are ways to make it less random. You can play without the events deck, for instance; you can pull out the sugarless candy card, and your play will be a little more predictable. I think it will be a little less thematic. But, you know, it’s your game. Play it however you want. Like, I’m not going to get offended. I want players to be happy.

Right, come up with some house rules.

Yeah, play it correctly the first time or two. Ideally, know what you don’t like. If you think you’d like it without stuff, hey, do it that way.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Do you have other games that you’re thinking about making?

I’m trying to adapt a game that I did for Board Game Geek’s Game Night, and I ran the first two parts of the trilogy online for them. So I’m looking at turning that into basically a nine-episode campaign, or I should say, a three-episode campaign, but each episode broken down into smaller chunks, so you can sit and just play for an hour as a little palate cleanser, like a kind of semi RPG, a little co-op, where you’re all playing the same character, and that is set in the world of ’80s big hair bands. It’s very Spinal Tap-esque and fun. And so that one’s pretty much done.

Then I have some things that I want to do that are that are truly more historical. My historical games tend to focus on overlooked women.

In music, or just in general?

No, in general. I’m a history buff. So there are eras that fascinate me, and there are women’s roles in them that just haven’t ever really had a light shone on them. So I kind of want to do that. And one of the ones I want to do is set in the late Gilded Age, and involves finance, and one of the richest women in America. So it’s inspired by her life. Where you see all the men making money, there were women were doing that too. So this is going to focus more on the women, although it may just be that the game itself is this woman, and you are playing some of the men trying to beat her. That could be the game. We’ll see; that one’s in an early stage.

What is it like to be a different kind of “star,” in the tabletop world?

I mean, I wasn’t so famous — like, I can walk down the street, no one knows who I am. It’s great. But you go to a board game convention, and I’m now, like, board game famous, which is weird. I’m getting stopped. And it’s like, “Excuse me, are you Jackie Fox?” But people are so nice in the board game world. We had these lines that were so insane [at Gen Con…] We had games in two places, both of the exhibit hall and then Devir [Games] for the first time, rented a separate room that they turned into basically the Rock Hard room. They had standees of the characters, and then a big stage with these giant amps, and it was so much fun. They were supposed to open that room at nine. So I showed up on the first day at 8:45, and they said, “Oh, hey, your game sold out.” And I said, “Wait, what do you mean? My game sold out?” And they said, “People started lining up so early that Gen Con came and said, ‘Hey, you need to deal with your line.’” So they opened the room at like 7:30 and started selling the game. So the next day, they decided they were opening at 8 to get everybody out of there.

Did you expect that? Was that a surprise?

Kind of, but not to the extent it was. Like, the second day I went, “If people are waking up that early to get my game, I’m gonna go wake up early and hang out with them on the line.” So I got there about 7:30, and the first person in line had gotten there at 6:15 to make sure that she got a copy of the game. So, yeah. And everybody — like I said, they’re so nice. They line up and they, you know, take their turn going in, and if they couldn’t get a copy of the game, I just signed their convention badges and post for pictures, and had a really good time.

There aren’t a lot of music-themed board games. Or, there are about to be. And not ones that are really thematic. And so it was really hitting the spot for a lot of people that have been waiting for years for a game that felt like the theme was really baked in.

Rock Hard: 1977

Prices taken at time of publishing.

Designed by former rock star Jackie Fox (The Runaways), Rock Hard: 1977 is a tabletop game in which you play as an aspiring musician who tries their best to achieve mainstream success in the unpredictable and sometimes hostile music industry of the era.