Harmonix has been in the music gaming scene for years now, with successes like Guitar Hero and Rock Band making the developer a household name across the globe. The company has now teamed up with Hasbro to create a board game/video game/music making… thing called DropMix, and it’s outstanding.
DropMix has a competitive game mode, a cooperative game mode and a freestyle mode. However, to explain how the games work, it’s worth diving into the central concept of DropMix. The two main components are the official board and a series of playing cards. The cards, each with chips embedded inside, contain certain parts of songs. The yellow cards are the vocal tracks, blue cards have drum tracks, red cards have melody hooks and green cards are bass lines or other backing sounds.
Once a card is laid onto the board, that card’s track will start playing through a linked mobile device. Putting down a few more cards will quickly build out a custom mix. For example, dropping the Sia “Chandelier” vocal track, the drum track for Run DMC’s “It’s Tricky,” the horns from Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” and the strings from Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” will instantly create a mix featuring all those pieces of songs. What’s even more impressive is the mixes created all range from listenable enough to outright catchy.
And when I say these new mixes are created instantly, I mean it. You’d think it might take some thinking to squeeze Disturbed’s “Down With The Sickness” vocals into a track with Far East Movement’s “Fly Like A G6” drums and The Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face” bass line, but DropMix will adjust to the new cards and have a new mix pumping without dropping a single beat.
But how well does DropMix work as a game? The basic head-to-head mode, called Clash, allows two to four players to join in, with each player having a stack of cards. During a team’s turn, players lay down cards to score points and create new mixes or press the DropMix button, allowing you to remove an opponent’s cards from the board. The first team to 21 points is the winner.
The cooperative mode, called Party, allows up to five players to team up against the game itself. Broken up into five rounds, Party mode gives players “requests” to fulfill, such as playing a particular type of card at a certain time or even removing a card of a certain color from the board. Accuracy and speed at fulfilling these requests earns your team points. After all the rounds have ended, the point total is calculated and you can see if your team hit the high score or not.
Over the course of a weekend, I managed to play DropMix with a surprising number of people and it took each person a game or two of Clash to figure out the rules. Once they did, they all wanted to play just one more to really get into it. Rounds only last a few minutes each, so it’s easy to play through a few games in a half hour or so. I also played Party with a few people, but interest in the co-op mode wasn’t as high as Clash.
As a bonus, there’s also a Freestyle mode that allows aspiring DJs to experiment with the DropMix cards. In Freestyle, players can modify a mix’s beats per minute as well as the mix’s key.
One of the best features for DropMix is the ability to instantly save any mix you have created, even if you are in the middle of a game. If, while playing Clash, you and your opponent create an awesome new mash-up that you want to hear again, simply click the “Save Mix” button in the upper corner of your smart device. Saved mixes can be found on the DropMix main menu.
The ability to pass the music through to a Bluetooth speaker is another standout feature. Although the DropMix board pairs with your smart device through Bluetooth, it doesn’t interfere if you have higher quality wireless speakers you’d prefer to use.
DropMix isn’t on store shelves just yet, but pre-orders for the base game have already begun on Hasbro’s website. The board, along with 60 song cards, will retail for $99.99. Bonus cards are also available, but many feature variations of the same songs and cards you already get in the base pack. For example, the drum track for Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” is in the main game, but the vocal track for the song can be purchased separately. Not every card is a track that’s already featured, but it is a little disappointing to get a new pack of cards only to find similar sounds to the ones you already have.
My only concern is how much replayability there is for someone already familiar with all the cards. While there are a huge number of combinations of mixes that can be created just from the base set, you’ll hear the same choruses and drum loops again and again, even after just a few games. DropMix will likely continue to be updated with new cards to buy to help keep things fresh. It’s also possible Harmonix will update its app with additional game modes, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet.
So what do you think? Are you interested in creating your own music with DropMix? What other crazy card/board/video game hybrids have you played? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
