The moment my husband and I sat down to play Bebop, these very words fell out of my mouth.
“Look, sweet’haht,” I said in a gravely voice with a thick Brooklyn accent, lighting a cigarette while half covered in shadow. “I’m the booking agent for the Tri-State Jazz Festival and I got a crisis on my hands. The piano crowd’s demanding front-row seats, someone double-booked the triple stage, and some wiseguy just tried to sit a saxophone enthusiast in a percussion-only section. I’ve got VIPs breathing down my neck, the ushers are on strike, and some guy named “Skins” refuses to sit under fluorescent lighting. I don’t got time to explain seat logistics to every trombone fan in the boroughs.”
My husband blinked at me silently and took another sip of his tea. “If you’re gonna learn to smoke right now, can we at least open a window?,” he asked flatly. He doesn’t get it. What does he know? Day in and day out, fans running me ragged. I took another drag from my cigarette to calm my nerves. “You wanna make it in this business? You gotta keep your head in the game, eyes everywhere, and nerves of steel.” I flicked ash into a cracked ashtray. “Otherwise you’re just another sap watching the whole show fall apart.”
I tell ya, if nothing else, I might have found my calling as a fast-talking, noir booking agent. The game is just about as stressful I think.
In Bebop, you’re not orchestrating the bands, you’re orchestrating the crowd. You’re placing seats, booking bodies, and trying to score points in several complicated ways. It’s not as breezy as it looks…it’s hard work. That’s showbiz baby.
Let’s start with the basics. On your turn, you do one of two things: Claim a seat (place a hex tile on the board) or Book a seat (place a colored die into a hex that’s already out there). That’s it. Those are your only actions. The beauty (and the pain) is in what those actions mean, because each die you place might trigger multiple types of scoring, and you need to be thinking about all of them at once.
Here’s the scoring mental stack. It’s a bit of a doozy.
There’s Family Scoring where you place a die next to other matching dice (same color), and you instantly score points equal to all the die faces matching yours in that group. So if there are two other red pianos, you would score three points. It doesn’t matter who owns which dice…a group is a group.
The next type is Stage Scoring. When a stage tile is fully surrounded and booked with dice, it scores. Each stage has some combo of three instrument types. The player with the most matching dice adjacent to the stage scores points based on the instrument’s current value. But dice connected through a Family can also count toward adjacency, even if they aren’t right next to the stage. Here’s the kicker: after an instrument scores, its point value drops, which adds this cool tempo pressure. Timing your scores before others tank the value becomes a big part of the game’s tension.
Finally, there’s the Endgame Scoring. At the end, find the largest Family for each color. Within each group, the player with each instrument majority scores. The number of stage tokens you collected throughout the game is the number of points you’ll score, of that instrument type. It’s a clever incentive to build long-term plans across color groupings and instrument control.
It’s smartly designed, tactically interactive and full of meaningful choices. And you’re not just building your own thing…you’re directly interfering with others: stealing stage control, tanking instrument values, or forming families they can’t tap into.
It’s also pretty vicious. Every hex seat or die you place gives away information, helps others incidentally, and opens new risks. The board state shifts constantly, and trying to predict outcomes more than a turn ahead is very difficult. But man, Bebop is deceptively hard to learn well. The gameplay is simple. The scoring is absolutely not. You’ll forget to drop the instrument track after scoring. You’ll overlook family scoring moments. You’ll miss adjacency through long chains.
It’s not so much complex as it is mentally dense. It demands repeat plays just to be able to interact with the depth and desperately needs a good rules explainer at the table to help keep it from becoming homework on turn one.
I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong for a designer to create a game in which you just won’t get it on the first game, but there’s risk in it because, let’s face it, we move on quickly in the board game world.
I recently gave Corps of Discovery a rave review specifically because I love games that ask their players to meet them halfway and don’t baby you. But the difference is I fully understood the goal from the start. Four games of Bebop still had me pulling my hair out, trying to hold all three layers of scoring in my head at the same time with each seat and dice placement. It crosses that line where it starts to feel a little too close to unpaid labor.
I genuinely want to love Bebop. On paper, it has everything I enjoy. Tight mechanics, tactical puzzles, and point-scoring tension that evolves over time. And to be clear: it’s a very good game. But I think I’ve realized I admire it more than I enjoy it. I respect the layers, but playing it feels like a constant mental juggling act where a single mistake (or just forgetting to adjust the instrument track) can unravel everything. It actually reminds me of Spirit Island in that way…brilliant, but more exhausting than fun for me.
This isn’t a problem with the design. It’s a matter of taste. Some folks thrive on games that reward high mental bandwidth and ruthless timing. If that’s you, Bebop might become a favorite. But if you prefer your decisions intuitive and want to comprehend the full picture from the beginning, this might wear you down faster than it wins you over.
So here we are, four games deep, ashtray full, cigarette burned down to the filter. And I’m still not sure if I’m running the show or being run ragged by it. I’m one misplayed die away from a complete PR disaster. I flick an invisible ash off the table, stare down the scoring track, and mutter, “This business’ll chew you up and spit you out, kid.”
My husband calmly refills the teapot. “You look like you need a nap,” he says.
Maybe I do. Or maybe I just need a game that doesn’t make me feel like I’m about to be fired.
But hey. At least the piano fans found their seats.