Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge Review

Welcome to the Voodoo Lounge. Order up a Royal Gin Fizz, sink into that groovy loveseat, and just chill, man. One of our flying monkeys will be along to serve you shortly. Join a private party or mingle with the cliques on the periphery. If you get bored with the jivecats, hipsters and lounge lizards you see before you, take one of our voodoo portals to splash with the sirens in the Neptune Lounge, do the rhumba in the Cocoa Lounge, light up with Ol' Pitch in the Lava Lounge, or dance to those island drums in our world-famous Tiki Lounge. Just have a swanky time, daddy-o.

Did that intro paragraph seem like it was trying a little too hard to conjure up a retro-chic past that never existed? Then you're going to love opening up Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge's funky-shaped box and laying your peepers on its far-out contents. Say hello to 5 plastic "Made in China" martini glasses, 5 sets of day-glo, semi-translucent poker chips, voodoo skills, plastic monkeys, player-aid coasters, and a full deck of "Clique" cards, each imprinted with a different cocktail recipe. The board art looks like the intro animations of all those crazy '60s sitcoms had a drunken orgy with the entire Hanna-Barbera catalogue.

I've never seen a game more at odds with its own presentation. The drink recipes make you think this is one of those light games that mix well with heavy spirits, but actually playing it feels like trying to comprehend the Space Baby sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey while hungover. I am not afraid of heavy or complicated games, but it took me 3 full plays to stop actively cursing the game for giving me migraines. Once you get used to it, though, there's a pretty sharp abstract strategy game buried under all that retro-tchotchke theming.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to hobnob with all the hippest hepcats and jivesters in a Kennedy-era cocktail lounge. You do this by buying drinks for the "typical lounge lizards" (this is an actual game term) in the hopes of forging a connection to the worthier hipsters and jivecats or of fulfilling one of the current trends, either of which will score you monkey points (literally hanging a plastic monkey on the rim of your cocktail glass). The game ends when a player has accumulated at least 15 monkey points. In the meantime, you can manipulate your odds by casting voodoo spells, because why the hell not?

In gameplay terms, you are trying to lay out networks of influence chips in order to reach the point-scoring hipster and jivecat spaces or satisfy one of the Trend cards on offer. Each lounge lizard, except the jivecats, has a number, and you can claim a space by playing a matching-numbered card from your hand. You can also fudge the numbers by playing a pair of cards, either adding or subtracting their values. In either case, you must already have a chip on an adjacent lounge lizard. You can also play the Clique cards as one of five spells: Cheval lets you leapfrog one of your chips around the board, Checkers-style; Zombie spells can be put into your tableau to be played on subsequent turns as though they were in your hand; Rada forces opponents to pay you a skull token if they want to use any card of that number (even as a spell); Voodoo Dolls let you remove an opponent's chip, Zombie or Rada; and the Jivecat spell is the only way to get one of your chips onto one of the rare jivecat spaces, scoring you 2-3 monkey points in the process.

Mostly, you are placing chips in order to build a social while also trying to meet the critera to claim the Trend cards. This trend scoring is actually the most thematically appropriate part of the game: trends that are in Vogue score 2 points, Passé trends only score 1, but Retro trends go back to scoring 2 monkeys. Trends range in difficulty from claiming 2 jivecats of the same color to getting a same-numbered lounge lizard in all four lounges. Trends also give you ongoing special abilities that require skulls, which are earned by influencing lounge lizards.

None of it makes a drop of sense--all of the cultural window-dressing is entirely superficial, just like the appropriative cocktail culture it's based on. The "voodoo lounge" theme, thinly supported as it already is, clashes horribly with the melange of cartoon characters from history, literature, pop culture and beyond populating each lounge.Which is fine as long as it doesn't interfere with the gameplay.

Unfortunately, that's not always the case, particularly with some of the Trend cards, added during the game's crowdfunding campaign, that require players to claim four or five specific characters spread across the crowded board. Even the designer has started referring to these as "Where's Waldo?" cards. Simple functions such as adjacency can be hard to read and the whole thing is just completely cluttered. I'm also not sure that the endgame conditions are completely balanced, and I know that the 2-3 player variant (introduced late in development) actually results in a worse game than just playing with the normal rules.

There's a nice abstract, card-driven route-building game in here—a friend called it "wonky checkers"--but the decision to invest so much into the retro theme has led to an overpriced, hard-to-read product that requires several plays to show its true potential.