The jazz. The food. The architecture. The beignets. New Orleans is a city like no other. Big Easy Busking is a new game from rising publisher Weird Giraffe Games. Clocking in at around 45 minutes, it’s a brisk game for tempo management and area-majority that manages to capture the feel of street performing, if not necessarily the feel of New Orleans specifically.

Just one block over from the boozy wonderland that is Bourbon Street is a quiet promenade. It’s Royal Street - with its art boutiques, cafes, and stores - that features in Big Easy Busking. The street is built by laying out a row of cards representing various crowds. I haven’t seen the final art so I’m not quite sure what it will look like, but the prototype cards were drawn in a brightly colored style evocative of what you’d see on a trip to the Big Easy.

These crowd cards have two major pieces of information on them. The first is their point values. Each card will provide a cash payout - points - to the band that manages to entertain that crowd the most; all players will receive a separate payout so long as they meet a minimum threshold. The other note of information is the crowd’s mood. Some crowds are feeling romantic, while others are looking for an upbeat party atmosphere. Play the right song to the right crowd and you gain flexibility.

While cash is used throughout Big Easy Busking, the key resource is energy. Represented by little wooden cubes, your band must expend energy to learn songs or to play them to the crowd. These energy cubes are what’s left on a crowd card to determine who takes home the area-majority prize money. The energy management is simple to grasp yet they’re used in a number of clever ways to make Big Easy Busking worth recommending.

Your band is represented by 3 musicians printed on your player card. Each can be given a pool of energy cubes to spend in different ways. Playing music for a crowd obviously uses some energy and typically it’s a different amount for each musician. A song with a heavy trumpet solo is going to demand more of your trumpet player, leaving him less able to repeat the performance for a different crowd later.

The other use is learning songs. Discarding 1 cube per musician allows you to pick up a song card from the public row of song cards. Once learned, they’ll remain in your hand for the remainder of the game as your band commits the jam to memory. There is also a row of jazz standards. Known and playable by any player, they can be claimed temporarily and played for any crowd. Crowds don’t just want to hear classic standards however; playing a standard will cost you money from your pool of cash presumably representing a slight decrease in tips.

The other way to spend cash comes in spending cash to tip your own band, which recuperates energy and allows them to keep playing. This is critical in allowing your band to continue to learn and play music after others have exhausted themselves. What makes Big Easy Busking interesting is the various ways these resources link and interact. Dollars are also victory points so you must be careful spending too much, but if you cling miserly to your money you’ll never develop a portfolio large enough to rule Royal Street.

A wide repertoire of songs is critical to energy management as well. Playing a song that matches the mood of your crowd gives you a clever choice. Ordinarily you must leave behind all the energy cubes you’ve used to play a song but if your moods match then you can take some of those crowd vibes with you and reuse those cubes elsewhere. This little design element is riff that makes this game sing. It can completely disrupt opponent’s plans and predictions, and open a number of clever plays. You can force an opponent to over-commit to a crowd only to pull those cubes back and use them to steal another crowd away.

The only place where Big Easy Busking stumbles in its integration with the setting. The mechanisms almost perfectly evoke the feel of street musicians jamming through the night, feeding off of crowds and each other to fill the air with music. Unfortunately, nothing other than the art makes you think New Orleans.

This is admittedly, a minor nitpick. As someone who loved his visits to New Orleans I would have preferred to feel the city as much as I feel like a street performer. These musicians could be playing on any street in any city. It claims New Orleans in the way a tourist might claim that a restaurant they read about in the in-flight magazine is a secret hidden gem. Is it real New Orleans? Probably not. But it’s close enough that the art will draw you in.

Despite that, Big Easy Busking is a smart game that puts enough twists on area-majority to feel fresh. I love the option to not leave everything I’ve committed to an area behind if I plan my concert well, and the temptation to spend victory points to keep playing is ever present. Weird Giraffe Games is an emerging force in the realm of 45-60 minute games that sacrifice no tension for their short playtimes. As easy to teach as it is to play, Big Easy Busking is worth jamming along to with a cup of chicory coffee and a warm beignet.

Weird Giraffe Games provided a prototype for the purposes of this review.

Raf Reviews - Big Easy Busking

Rafael Cordero

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