Former Runaways member Jackie Fox's new board game is inspired by her rock star past

Day 612:10Former Runaways bassist Jackie Fox has a new board game inspired by her own rock star past

You might expect Jackie Fox, former member of the all-girl teen rock band The Runaways, to chronicle her life in and out of the entertainment industry in a memoir or book.

Instead, Fox — real name Jacqueline Fuchs — combined her intimate knowledge of the late '70s music industry and her passion for games to design a new board game called Rock Hard: 1977.

In the game, up to five players each play as one of 10 fictional, aspiring rock stars and navigate the complexities of trying to make it big in the industry.

Players have to choose actions meant to build their reputation and business, including doing radio interviews, doing musical gigs in small club venues, and hanging out backstage to meet people who can help — or hinder — your budding career.

Fox told Day 6 host Brent Bambury that she wanted to make a game inspired by European strategy games, but with the speed and unpredictability of American board games.

"I love this game mechanism called worker placement, where ... you want to do everything, but you can only do one thing at a time, and there's competition for those spaces. And I thought, the music industry just fits perfectly with this," she said.

Rock Hard made a splash this past August at Gen Con, a major board game convention in Indianapolis, where it ended up on many board game blogs' lists for favourite or most anticipated new game.

"It more or less sold out I believe the first day of the convention, and was in very, very short supply every day that followed," said Charlie Hall, tabletop games editor for Polygon.

Fox said the mechanics and the rock star story are "intricately tied together" in her game — something that isn't always the case with board games, where the theme might be added after the rules are written, for visual flair.

"So the theme inspired what actions you can take in the game ... so that you feel like you are a rock musician just starting out in your career," she said.

Dan Arndt of the gaming site The Fandomentals says it's a great example of "top-down" game design, where the rules are written in service of the theme — which is less common than a game designed the other way around.

"The real successful games are able to capture the same emotions, the same feelings you get from experiencing the real thing. So Rock Hard is great because it has a bit of that rock 'n' roll chaos, that unpredictability, that self-aware punk ethos that made Jackie and her contemporaries so iconic," he said.

Fox says the player characters take inspiration from people she knew during her time with The Runaways, but she wanted to craft a more idealized and diverse cast for the game than what most people would be familiar with at the time.

"In the '70s, the biggest rock stars tended to be white and male," she said, but the game's cast features men and women, and people of multiple racial backgrounds. "You had everybody working in the rock scene, and I wanted those people to be seen."

The game's cards all have short narrative or "flavour" text that Fox drew on her personal experience to write at the request of the game's publisher Devir Games, though they don't cite specific real-world stories.

"They asked for this very close to the deadline. So I just started writing things that had happened to my friends and me, the craziest things that I could think of," she said.

As an example, the game includes a scenario where a famous person invites you to go out partying for the night. "You had overnight fame, but you were sleeping in the next day and not getting your business done," she explained.

Board games with explicitly biographical elements are fairly rare, according to Casto Chan, operations manager at Snakes & Lattes, a Canadian chain of board game cafes. He cited Heading Forward, which draws from designer John du Bois' recovery after suffering a traumatic brain injury, as one example.

"I think it's probably a lot more common to find games that are inspired by certain parts of the designer's experience, rather than fully biographical," said Chan. He cited Coyote & Crow as an example, which is designed by Cherokee nation member Connor Alexander and set in a reimagined North America that never experienced European colonization.

Empowered storytelling, not a tell-all memoir

A purely autobiographical version of the game would likely include darker elements that Fox has previously said she doesn't want to revisit in the form of a tell-all memoir.

In 1975, she joined The Runaways whose members included Joan Jett and Cherie Currie. They released their hit song Cherry Bomb in 1976, but Fox would leave the next year.

In 2015, after the death of the band's manager and producer Kim Fowley, she revealed details about her time with the band. Fox said that she quit after Fowley drugged and raped her, in front of a backstage crowd that included other members of the band. Jett denied being present, while Currie said she was in the room with Fox and Fowley, but immediately spoke up and left.

Since then she built a career largely removed from her rock band time, becoming an entertainment lawyer. In 2018, she appeared on Jeopardy, becoming a four-time champion.

For Rock Hard, however, Fox drew upon her love of board games that began long before her time with the Runaways.

"My family played games when we were growing up, from starting with my grandparents being bridge and cribbage players," she said. "But modern board games, I fell into [them] I'd say somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago, when I wandered into a board game meet-up at a local pizza parlour, and I've never looked back."

Candy crash

While Rock Hard depicts the era of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, drugs don't make an explicit appearance in the game. Instead, players can collect candy tokens, which can be used to produce a sugar rush that grants players additional actions — but at a risk. The more you use candy, the higher your cravings become, which may lead to a crash.

In an interview with Polygon, Fox said the candy mechanic can be a stand-in for the many kinds of cravings and addictions she's seen in the music industry.

"I've had friends who have struggled with needing to work out really hard every day, to the point where it was detrimental," she said. "There's gambling, there's sex addiction, there's just the need for attention."