The Runaways’ Jackie Fox is reimagining her rock ‘n’ roll story in tabletop form

polygon.com:

Jacqueline Fuchs, aka Jackie Fox — the stage name coined during her time as the bassist for The Runaways — knows a lot about the dark side of the music industry. But she also knows its joys and its potential rewards. All of that is a part of Rock Hard: 1977, a tabletop game she designed about climbing the music industry’s slippery ladder to mainstream success.

The game’s design is directly inspired by her real-life experiences in the industry, although it’s not so dark that it isn’t still a fun board game. Jackie Fox went to Gen Con in early August to demo the game and meet its many, many new fans. In a video call with Polygon this week, she told us about her longtime tabletop game obsession and her decision to make a board game of her own.

Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Polygon: So, why a tabletop game?

Jackie Fox: Well, unfortunately, I’m not sitting in the room where my games are, but if I was, you would see how much I love tabletop games. I like video games as well, but there’s that tactile dimension with tabletop that is just — it puts you in a different space, and it takes you off your screens for a while, and it’s very social in a way that doing something online isn’t.

Telling a story in a game can be difficult. How did you think about that, in terms of design and creating the characters?

I made sure these characters felt very real, that they were people that I would have known in the ’70s, and that all the flavor text on the cards — a lot of it was stuff that really happened to me. And so you can create a little story along with the help of that. It’s telling you, “Here’s what’s happening to your character,” but you’re getting to make choices. It’s essentially a Euro, but there’s an overlay of American-style games, because I wanted a strategy game that had the fun factor of, you know, that anything can happen.

How dark did you want to go? From the photos, it’s clear that instead of drugs, you have “candy” in the game, and