With the physical instruments scene long past peak popularity, the folks over at Harmonix, in conjunction with Hasbro, have moved on to something that?s quite a bit different from the Boston developer?s previous games. DropMix [Free] is a physical board game that?s a delightful mix of approachable card-based gameplay combined with amazing music the Harmonix pedigree. Sure, the gameplay is a little basic, and like music games some of your enjoyment is based on your love of the music included, but damn if it isn?t simply fun to play with other people.
Before we get into gameplay specifics, let?s talk about the DropMix cards themselves, which are the star of the show. Each corresponds to a specific song and a specific track from that song. For example, yellow cards are vocal tracks, red cards are instrumentals, blue cards are drums, and green cards are rhythm tracks (such as bass guitar). Special universal cards have all the tracks for the song and will play whatever tracks are allowed on that particular slot. Each card also has a strength meter attached to it, which both indicates how loud that track will play compared to the rest of the mix and also acts as a barrier when actually playing a competitive game (you can?t drop a lower level card on top of a higher level card). The DropMix Board itself has five slots that correspond to one or two of each of the above colors. Regardless of the game mode selected, the goal is to always match cards to the corresponding color on the...