Famous: Stage I Board Game Review

Steve Godfrey
3 hours ago
9 min read

Famous: Stage I

WBG Score: 6.5

Player Count: 1-4

This is a free review copy. See our review policy here

I was in a band when I was younger, and I wrote the odd song here and there as well. So as a peek into my life, I’ll add an audio clip at the end of me singing a song I wrote back in the day... not really, can you imagine? People would boycott the site as punishment after hearing that... anyway, on with the review.

How to get the band back together.

First, give everyone a player board. Each one has a different music genre, so give everyone their favourite or their least favourite; you never know, it may spark a love for a new music genre in them. Give everyone their hours dial and have them slot it satisfyingly into their player board. Then give everyone two leaders to choose from, keeping one.

On a player's turn, they can perform one of the four main actions as described on their player board. They pay the depicted amount of hours by rotating their dial (seriously, why is that thing so fun to play with?) and then moving up that track and taking the action. They may also perform one of the “other” actions on their board, again paying any hours if required. They may also discard cards from their hand for their discard bonus in the top left corner. The four main actions are:

Write: This will be the main way to get song cards that you’ll need for endgame scoring and requirements to play certain levels of gigs.

Rehearse: Rehearsing will level up a musician from your band. The total skill of your band will be important for endgame scoring and gigs.

Network: Here is where you get to take contract cards, which will give you a variety of things like private gigs, one-time bonuses, musicians to join your band, and ways to help you make actions cheaper and help manipulate endgame scoring.

Advertise: This is how you get fans to come to your gigs, and as we’ll learn later, the more fans, the better.

You also have a few “other” actions. These will let you play a card, go shopping, promote (this track is important in endgame scoring, and the higher up you are on it, the better), rest (this will get you a heart token), and exert. Exert lets you spend two heart tokens to gain an hour of time back.

At the end of a round, once everyone has passed, you move onto the weekend. Here you move your vans along the road/s you’ve set them on. If they reach a gig space, play that gig. Take all the fan dice you have next to the van and roll them. You can then manipulate them depending on what milestones you’ve reached on your street team/performance track. Total up the score and compare it to the gig card, then take the reward appropriate to your score. Once everyone has played any gigs, you can move vans to other tracks to head towards other gigs. The rest of the weekend is where you’ll resolve an event card, do some clean-up, and depending on which round you're in, score specific calendar events. These are just mini-scoring that will net you a few points depending on where you are on a specific track.

At the end of the final round, you do some endgame scoring. First, discard any contact cards in your hand for $100 each. Then divide your money by the number relating to your position on the promo track to get your score for your money. Score points for your musicians based on their personalities (each one has a different scoring condition). Now it’s time to make your album, your magnum opus, which will stand the test of time with novel titles like “Where did our printer ink go,” “This complicated latte,” and the hit single “Washer fluid warning”... that reminds me, I must top that up soon. First, pick up to five of the songs you collected in the game. Then add up the total skill levels of all of your band members and collect that many dice and allocate a number of dice to each of your five songs. Then roll the dice for each song and put the highest on that card. Each song has a multiplier number on it, so multiply that number by the dice you place on that card. Do this for each card, add the numbers together, and then multiply them by your place on the promo track to get your VP total. Add it to the points you gained from everything else, and the high score wins.

What You’re Proposing

I generally don’t like tough decisions. Ranking my games on Pub Meeple often leaves me with some choices that are the equivalent of asking me to rank my two children. It takes a while, but eventually, I do it. After that, picking the games is easy. When it comes to playing games, though, I love it. Give me all the tough choices you can throw at me. Infamous clearly heard my plea and then subsequently said, “hold my dive bar beer” and gave me exactly that. All four main actions are important, and you’ll need to keep your hand in all of them if you want to keep in the mix (little recording joke for you all... ahem).

It’d be all too easy to just say, “well, just keep an even balance between them then.” It’s a great plan, for a bit. That is until the game throws in a few twists. At any point, an event card could reward players for their progress on certain tracks. The calendar rewards will do the same as well, and no matter how hard you try, the competitive side of you will emerge, and you’ll want to make a break for those rewards. Everything is interconnected, and no matter how much you may want to advance on the writing track, there may be another part of the game that’s tempting you in another direction.

Take gigs, for example. You may really want to focus on getting as many dice on your van as possible to get better rewards for a gig. To play a certain calibre of gigs, however, you’ll need particular skill levels and certain numbers of songs (You can’t expect your one cover of Zombie by The Cranberries to get you into the fancy places). So now you need to decide if you want the dice for now or set yourself up for potentially better rewards in the future.

This goes to more than eleven.

As the saying goes, “there just aren’t enough hours in the day,” and nowhere is that truer than in this game. First, let’s talk about the hours because my word is that thematic. Spending all of your time rehearsing, writing, and getting the word out takes the most precious resource a band has: time. But typically, you don’t have enough of it. For the majority of this game, you’ll find yourself performing two of the four main actions per round. Three if you plan well and/or manage to claw some time back, and that’s what makes all your decisions so much tougher. Fear not, though, because you've still got those extra actions, even though you can only do one per turn. Oddly enough, it’s the extra actions that throw in a lot of the variety. Shopping for clothes and gear is a great way to flaunt your cash to the other players as you go on a spending spree that would put the most extravagant of musicians to shame. At which point you’ll probably need some merch to sell to offset said spree, band back rub coupons anyone?

It’s the contract cards that will end up mixing your game up the most, though. In this admittedly large deck, you’ll find your artists for your band, service cards that will either make main actions cheaper or let you manipulate endgame scoring, and private gigs, which need specific requirements to play but will get you set rewards. Supporter cards will add to your street team track that will help you manipulate dice in the gig phase. Lastly, prospect cards will, for the cost of one hour, give you one-off bonuses. Speaking of bonuses, you can always just discard a card for its bonus found on the top left of the card. Something you’ll probably need to do just to keep to your hand limit. The cards themselves are a lot of fun with some interesting venues for private gigs. I love the artwork across all the characters, and all the musicians have their own unique art on them. The song cards each have unique song titles across them all, meaning that every album you go to craft will have a different track list every time.

This game is obviously a labour of love, and you can tell that this has been designed by someone who has lived this life, and I think that it will most likely resonate with someone who has had any kind of experience in a band, especially one that’s just starting out. It does enough to show you that starting a band ain’t easy and that yes, you will be playing for peanuts and probably selling merch out of the back of your car. I was in a band once, and so for me, this sparked a bit of a trip down memory lane. For example, I've played gigs in random places. I once played a gig in a library! Now, while I can’t say we ever got to even some of the heights that this game puts its bands in, it was still nice to have even a hint of recognition in there. Of course, you don’t need to know anything about that world to enjoy the game, but like a lot of other highly thematic games, how close you are to the theme will only help to boost your experience.

Whoa, we’re halfway there.

Strap yourself in for a game of this because it can be a long one. That’s not exactly a surprise if you read the box because the game even says that it's about 45 minutes per player, and I’d say that that’s about accurate, and for at least your first game, that’s sure to be longer. You can certainly shave off some of that time with experience, but how much will depend on you and your fellow players.

As I mentioned earlier, those four main tracks are all important, and you’ll want to keep up on all of them, which can be great for all the reasons I mentioned above. But it also works against it. Having everything integral to endgame scoring and so interconnected means that you don’t really have any scope to explore different strategies each game. You can’t, for example, explore a song and band-heavy strategy because you’ll need cards to populate the band. You can’t go the gig-heavy path because you need the band members and songs to help you play the good gigs. They’re so tightly woven together that the game ultimately just becomes an efficiency puzzle of how you’re going to navigate all those tracks each game rather than giving you the choice of which ones you want to do. Don’t get me wrong, for a lot of people that may sound like their sort of game, and if it is, then I definitely recommend you try this game. Personally, I like to try different strategies and push different buttons each game, and I think the fact that there’s less of an opportunity to do that will ultimately end up hurting the replayability for me.

If anything, I think the potential randomness of the endgame scoring will be the thing that will make or break this game for people, and I completely understand that. It can feel a bit disheartening putting all that work in to max things out as best you can only to have some poor dice rolls be your downfall. In a shorter game, this may not have been as big of a deal, but in a game of this length, it can really hurt the experience. Especially if someone else has managed to draw and buy a card to help manipulate their dice to give them a pretty big advantage. I can see a thematic element to it (you never know what song is going to catch people's attention), and I have seen some people say that they like this element, but for me, it's too much luck for a game like this. I certainly don’t fancy losing to poor dice rolls, and winning due to someone else's poor dice rolls doesn’t feel great to me either.

Rockin’ all over the world

Infamous: Stage 1 presents a thematic take on what it’s like to start a band and move them up the ranks to potential stardom. Not only that, but it portrays it with the knowledge of someone that’s been there and lived it, so the theme and the love for it really shine through. The theme will certainly hit more with anyone who is even a little bit close to it, and for those that aren’t, this will be a fun look into that life. It manages to wrap it all up into a decently fun game with some good in-game choices. I do worry that certain elements, like scoring, coupled with the game length, will put people off. For me, I don’t think it’s got as much replayability as I'd normally like from this sort of game, but if it’s only being played now and again (as, let’s face it, a lot of games are these days), then it could well be enough for some people.

Right, this game has got me all nostalgic, and I’m gonna go and see if I can get the old band back together. I’ll probably have to change my guitar strings, though; it’s been that long... on second thought, perhaps I’ll leave it.