Wouter & Ymke 
Putting together a band should be fairly straightforward. You need a vocalist, guitarist, drummer and bassist, with a keyboardist joining if you’re aiming for the full line-up. In 1st Band, though, several players are trying to fill those same positions. Musicians get replaced during the audition, the line-up can be completed before you’re ready, and the person playing the highest cards isn’t necessarily the one getting the best deal afterwards.
That’s because surviving the audition is only half the job. Once a band is complete, its members become available for players to collect, and lower-valued musicians give their owners an earlier choice. So you might want your 8 to hold a position, but you might be much happier if your 3 somehow manages to stay there. It’s a slightly backwards way of looking at card values, and it didn’t take us long to start questioning cards we’d normally play without a second thought.
👥 3-5 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes
📝 Design & artwork: Zong-Ger
🏢 Publisher: Good Game Studio (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each round of 1st Band has two phases, starting with the audition. Players take turns playing one member card from their hand, competing for five possible positions: vocal, guitar, drum, bass and keyboard. If a position is empty, your musician simply takes the seat. If somebody is already there, the two musicians have to compete for it.
When a new musician challenges an occupied position, you compare their values. The lower card is removed, while the higher card stays. If both values are equal, the newcomer is removed. You can also deliberately play a card that’s lower than the musician already occupying that position. It immediately leaves the game, but you’ve still used your turn and removed a card from your hand.
Some musicians can cover two roles. These dual-role cards challenge both matching positions at the same time, with each position resolved separately. Depending on what’s already on the table, one card can occupy one role, both roles, or disappear from the audition altogether.
The audition ends immediately once a band is complete, even if some players have taken fewer turns than others. There are two possible line-ups. A small band needs vocal, guitar, drum and bass, while a large band has those same four positions plus keyboard. Because a small band is already enough to end the audition, the keyboard needs to be in place before the other four positions are completed if it’s going to become part of that band.
Then it’s time for the performance phase. The musicians in the completed band are compared from lowest value upwards, with ranking cards handed out in that order. The player responsible for the lowest-valued musician gets the first ranking, followed by the next-lowest and so on. If you’ve managed to get several musicians into the final band, you can receive more than one ranking card.
All musicians from the band are then placed in the public area. Following the ranking cards, players take turns choosing one of them and adding it to their own scoring area. Afterwards, the starting player card passes to the player sitting to the left of whoever played the final card of the previous audition, and another round begins. Once all member cards have been played, any cards remaining in an incomplete band are removed.
Scoring starts by adding together the printed values of the musicians you’ve collected. Each small band in your scoring area adds another 5 points, while each large band is worth 10.
Artwork & Components
1st Band is entirely cards. There are 50 member cards, five ranking cards, four reference cards and a starting player card. There’s no board and nothing to punch out or arrange into an elaborate setup. You deal the cards, put the few shared cards within reach and you’re basically ready.
Each role has its own colour, while the musicians themselves are illustrated in black and white. There are stars, chunky numbers, bold lettering and performers posing with guitars, microphones, keyboards and drumsticks. It has the feel of rock posters mixed with comic-style character artwork. The colours are useful during play too, since it’s easy to see which positions are currently represented around the table.
Dual-role musicians stand out from the other cards, with both roles shown using their corresponding colours and names. The large numbers also make sense considering how often you’re checking values across the table. Nothing important is hidden in a tiny symbol somewhere in the corner.
The ranking cards have enormous numbers against black backgrounds with paint-like splashes, while the starting player card has a large “START” and the familiar rock hand gesture. The reference cards show the scoring combinations, and we kept those nearby during our first games. It’s a small production. We didn’t feel it needed anything more.
Our Experience
In our first game, we were mostly concerned with making sure our musicians survived. Someone had a 5 sitting in a position, so we’d play a 7 or 8 and feel pretty satisfied with ourselves. Then the band finished and the player who’d risked a 4 would choose before us, sometimes taking the 8 we’d just contributed. By the next game, we were spending much more time looking at the lower half of our hands, wondering which card could just about survive.
Naturally, we then went too far in the other direction. Everyone suddenly became rather optimistic about their 2s and 3s. There were several occasions where somebody played one, looked very pleased with themselves for about ten seconds, and then watched the next player remove it. I mean, technically the musician got an audition. It just wasn’t a particularly successful one. A 9 started to feel wasteful when a 5 probably would’ve been enough. That didn’t stop us occasionally convincing ourselves that a 3 was definitely safe. It usually wasn’t.
There were rounds where one of us had a low musician still hanging on and suddenly wanted somebody, anybody, to fill that final position before things changed. In other rounds, the current band suited somebody else far better and nobody seemed particularly eager to finish it. That’s also when deliberately playing a card we knew would lose started making sense. During our first game it looked like throwing away a card for no reason. Later, we had a few “why would you play that?” reactions, followed shortly afterwards by “ah, that’s why”.
Our drafting changed as our scoring areas filled up. Early on, the largest available number was hard to ignore. Later, a lower-valued bassist could be more useful than a higher vocalist simply because we were missing a bassist. We also started watching each other’s collections more closely. We’re generally more interested in improving our own score than blocking somebody else. Still, if nothing in the draft was particularly useful to us and one card was very obviously useful to somebody else, apparently our friendly band audition had its limits.
We preferred playing with four. With three players, we had more confidence that the table wouldn’t completely change before our next turn. At five, several musicians could come and go before we got another say, and a plan we had on our previous turn might already be irrelevant when play came back around. Four left a little more room to judge what might happen without us ever being completely sure. Our games generally lasted around 15 minutes.
Our Thoughts
Strong cards aren’t something we wanted to throw away casually. If an 8 was our only decent guitarist, using it to replace a 5 might solve the current problem and leave us with very little for the next audition. Lower cards have different uses. Some are worth risking or convenient to get rid of, and occasionally one hangs around for much longer than it has any right to. Dual-role musicians complicate things further because they can alter two positions at once. We found ourselves looking at what was left in our hand almost as much as what was already on the table.
The musicians we’d collected changed what we wanted later as well. An 8 is obviously worth more points than a 5, unless that 5 happens to be the bassist we’re missing for another band. There were drafts where the highest card disappeared immediately and others where everyone was looking at particular roles instead. Neither the number nor the role always takes priority, and what we wanted could look quite different from one draft to the next.
Our main criticism is the amount that can change before your turn comes back around. This was most noticeable with five players, where several musicians might have arrived or disappeared before we could act again. Your hand can restrict you as well. If you don’t have the values or roles you need, there’s no alternative action that lets you work around it. The position you were planning to challenge might simply not be there anymore, or somebody completes the band before you get another chance.
After several games, we’d also seen most of the situations the 50-card deck is likely to create. I don’t expect our twentieth game to suddenly reveal an entirely different way of playing. We can get better at judging what’s already there and what other players might still be holding, though. We’re less wasteful with high cards now and more suspicious when somebody plays an apparently useless card. We also notice sooner when a band is one musician away from being completed. There’s room for us to get better at those things, even if I don’t expect the game itself to change much along the way.
And that’s probably where we’ve landed with 1st Band. When we want an evening of careful planning, we’ll choose something else. Give us fifteen minutes and a few people around the table, though, and we’d happily play this again. We tend to keep watching the audition even when it isn’t our turn, and I like that a stronger card isn’t automatically more useful. A 9 can be exactly what we need or more than we wanted to spend. Every now and then, that questionable 3 even gets to stay on stage after all.
📝 We received a copy of 1st Band from Good Game Studio.
