In today’s The Producer’s Perspective blog, Ken Davenport writes about a new boardgame he has developed called “Be a Broadway Star”. Skimming the rules, it looks to be mostly “roll and move”, with some additional singing bits and Broadway-themed complications, like Equity cards and publicists. They don’t give an estimate of play time.
This intrigues me to some extent. After all, I have the board game that covers the other side of the picture: “The Broadway Game”. As I described it in a comment to Ken, that game (which is roll and move, to some extent) consists for three acts and a finale. In Act I, you are moving around the inner track, investing in the available shows for either a full or a discount price. Once a show has a full set of 10 investors (Act II), you move to the out of town tryout track, where you have do to things like meet payrolls, etc. If you can’t cover that from the initial investment, you have to go to your investors for money, and if they don’t have the funds, they may have to sell shares, which might move you to have to find investors again. If you make it through out of town tryouts, you open on Broadway, but again have to handle costs which could result in the show closing and having to go out of town again. Once all the shows have opened, there is an end-game with an odd voting scheme — perhaps the weakest part of the game.
The problem with “The Broadway Game” is that it is hard to get it played with the Euro-gaming crowd. Some just don’t like any game that involves rolling and moving (they don’t see the investing strategy part of the game). Some think it takes too long (playing the full game took almost 3 hours the last time I played it). Based on this, I’m not sure I want to pick up “Be a Broadway Star“. It isn’t that expensive ($29.95—and most Euros are $40+) looks potentially interesting (although I’m not sure about the singing aspect), but I fear that I would have trouble finding people to play it for the same reason that “The Broadway Game” has trouble.
