Game Preview: The Club

By W. Eric Martin
September 8, 2008

Publishers: Tuonela Productions / FRED Distribution
Designer: Jussi Autio
Players: 2-4
Ages: 13+
Playing Time: 45-60 minutes
Release Date: Spiel 08
Price: $30 (approx.)
Links:

If you thought Friese and Casasola Merkle went too far with Funny Friends, then save yourself a few minutes and read no further. In The Club, your goal is to help couples hook up, and the better you play matchmaker, the more you score. (Wink, wink)

Designer Jussi Autio says that the game was born from his feelings for the clubbing lifestyle. “I’m a romantic guy, and although I do like to go to bars and clubs to have some fun, I would hate to fall in love with someone I met there - because that’s how the ordinary love stories seem to begin and I want something more special than that.”

Thoughts on nightlife became the kernel of a game idea, an idea that sprang on Autio while he walked to university one day in 2007. “It hit me like thunder,” he says. “The idea that had been in my mind for a long time suddenly took its form, and I was so excited that I couldn’t stand still. I can’t remember what I was to do in the university, but I do remember that I had to call a few friends, draw some sketches on a booklet and ask their opinion.”

The 7x7 dance floor (i.e. gameboard) features a 3x3 central spotlight area where dancers can possibly find a partner. At the start of the game, players fill alternating spaces outside the spotlight area with a randomly drawn dancer. Each dancer tile has three visible qualities on it: musical taste, size, and party mood.

The three phases of man: calm, rocking, drunk


On a turn, you draw three tiles from the bag; for each dancer you draw, you place it at the end of a row near your side of the board, then push aMAZEing Labyrinth-style. If this push creates a pair of adjacent, opposite-gender tiles in the spotlight area that share at least one quality, the couple retires from the floor to continue the party elsewhere. For your role as matchmaker, you score 1, 3 or 5 points depending on how well the couple matches.


Two other dancers, showing the differences in size and musical taste (through background color)


What’s more, each dancer has a hidden quality on its face-down side; these aren’t seen during set-up, but you can peak at the bottom of the tiles you place. These qualities – a fat wallet, heartbreak, a room at your mom’s house, a beautiful roommate, a “full basket” – affect your scores in various ways. Want to ruin an opponent’s plans? Push a diseased dancer her way! Drunkenness, another visible quality, can also affect a player’s score for a couple.

Autio says that the four visible qualities, along with the notion of pushing dancers together, were in place from the initial vision, with the hidden qualities arriving a bit later. “At first they were balanced to give an even better laugh at stereotypes, such as having no religious heavy metal music fans and geeks who lived with their parents much more often than others, but after signing the contract I felt that nobody would spot those funny little pranks I put on there and just divided the hidden qualities equally. What might be lost on laughs will be won back from the fact that game is more balanced and you will need to pay attention to the dancers more.” Even those players who don’t track everything can likely keep an eye on the most (and least) promising dancers to keep them moving in the right directions.

Special people turn up at the club, too: guards to escort people off the floor, rock stars who score when they draw a crowd, and Mr. Annoying (you know the type!) who prevents all who are adjacent to him from hooking up. The game ends when the final dancer hits the club floor, and the player with the most points wins.


A CRT for clubbing? Modern life is tricky...


Autio says that an online version of The Club is in the works as well for those who want to experience all the joy of drunken anonymous hook-ups from their own home. Okay, he didn’t say it quite like that. “It has a theme that’s not very common in regular Eurogames, or board games altogether, and I wasn’t sure how open the public opinion would be for a game like this,” he says, but a recent outing at a local fair saw lots of enthusiastic players. “And what’s best, they were mostly women.” Who needs hard driving beats and alcohol when you have the power of board games on your side?

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One quality they all seem to share is huge breasts! Ok, I can understand that most women at a club will try to show them off, and I admit that I am the #1 fan of mammaries, but these are almost as big at their heads! Posted by Dan Corban on Sep 8, 2008 at 07:21 AM | #

Tacky. Posted by Ryan Walberg on Sep 8, 2008 at 09:07 AM | #

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