Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge – Review

Designer: Seth Roback

Artist: Sergi Marcet

Publisher: Game Designers Clubhouse

Number of Players: 2-5

Duration: 60 mins

When I saw this game appear on Kickstarter a few weeks back, there was very little that could hold me down to my chair for fear of jumping out of it. On paper Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge is the most exciting concept game that I have seen for a long while. Admittedly, right off the bat the theme itself is not going to appeal to everyone, and they have already cornered themselves into the adult market, but either way there are plenty of people that will get excited.

So what is Swinging Jivecat Voodoo Lounge, other than being the best named game to be released in 2015. The games theme is a drinking (and lots of it) deck building card game. Players take it in turns drawing cocktails and trying to make their way through the various lounges by placing tokens on characters on the board. There are various mission cards that appear throughout the game, and these usually evolve around getting a certain number of token in each bar or a chain of so many tokens. You get points for each mission completed and each special character that you land on, and the first player to fifteen points wins the game. Couldn’t be more simple.

Right, now the thing that really shines in this game are those cocktail cards. Each card has three purposes. You can use it for the face value that is on it to place a tile on the corresponding number on the board. You can also use it as an action card. This is where it all started to get a little confusing, and a lot of consulting of the rule book. There are a number of different actions on the cards, they are there to help you and also hinder your opponent. You can block players from landing on certain numbers, you can steal cards. Some of these actions require these really well crafted skeleton heads which are a nice but albeit weird touch. You get the idea.

The third use of the card, and here’s the real nifty thing that makes it all adult themed, each cocktail card represents a different drink and on each card is the full mixing instructions to make that drink. So even if you don’t like the game, you could end up with a neat collection of cocktail ingredients to get game night really going.

One interesting thing that this game does let you do is use multiple cocktail cards, and do maths. So you can take two cards and either add them or subtract them to get a whole new number. This can only end in disaster if you have been mixing drinks along the way.

Overall this game was fun, we spent time looking over each card and the art was really neat. However, I was really confused with the consistency of the theme throughout. Maybe that is me not being down with the hipster drinking scene but the whole voodoo aspect of the game was lost on me and how that fitted with the drinking theme which is otherwise consistent throughout.

A slight concern of mine is that it does lack some depth, and the actions provided on the cocktail cards thematically seem like an after thought. But that might just be me missing the point of them entirely. Without the actions it is just a simple exercise of getting the right number and building a network of tokens which you could quite easily do in this game.

It really is the little things that make this game great, from the cocktail cards to the martini glass to keep your scoring monkeys in (yes I said scoring monkeys).

Please drink responsibly.