Shuffle and Swing

Another game from the Bitewing Jazz Trio, Shuffle and Swing is meant to be the strictly Euro game out of the three. We covered Bebop before which was a Jazz themed strategy game of tile placement with dice with strong player interaction. Here, Shuffle and Swing has a dual rondel system and a focus on the shared board interactions rather than players working in a personal area. That rondel system had me really intrigued and was one of the main reasons why I was interested in the project.

There's a lot of front-loaded info for how to play but it can be distilled to a few steps:

1. Move your pawn to a new spot on the rondel, taking the shortest path.
2. Use a die in the area that your pawn is in for an action, the pips often determining how many times you can do that action.
3. After taking your action, you'll move that die to the next clockwise spot, ticking it up a step. Or if it was already at its highest, it'll move to a break room area between departments.

As for actions, there's three main actions, each department having spaces for them with build having two out of the 4 slices.

1. Build/Upgrade - spend workers to build parts of the instrument.
2. Refresh - Retrieve workers based on their row or column.
3. Inspect - Move a neutral pawn around the instrument, gaining points for each built part that they visit.

Alternatively you can also take a Brag action, this lets you go up on the Brag track of the instrument. Getting Brag actions is really important because this will affect your final scoring in many ways and its the only way to get the special bonus tokens that you can use to improve some of the main actions.

In the rulebook it says that you should only spend dice for Bragging as a "fail-safe" option, but I think that's highly dependent on player count. With how critical it is to move your marker up those Brag tracks, I think you may want to use it as a way to deny certain actions for a player temporarily from one third if the board. Because the only other way to go up the Brag tracks is if you get your die in a break room area. If you pass over your own die, you get two movement on any track(s) you want, but if another player passes over it then you only get one movement.

With how difficult it is to brag, I'm honestly surprised that the rulebook shows examples of people going further with the Brag track than what they've built for the instrument. It has a life lesson quip when going over the scoring example:

Bragging without evidence to back it up is hollow.

Which is a fair statement, one that rings true both for life and in how the game works - but also seems kind of odd when it feels like a struggle to even gain Brag actions. What's funny to me is that the opposite is also true in this game and life: "If you don't talk about your accomplishments, then how much does it matter to others once the end result complete?". This manifests in the scoring, as you take the lowest point value for completed instruments: Either how far you get on the Brag track or how many pieces of the instrument you built or upgraded.

One of the other main ways of scoring is through the Inspect action, where you move the Inspector mouse pawn along the lines and for each built part he visits the player gets the points printed for the part's spot. This means that the higher cost spots can end up gaining you points if you make use of the Inspect action accordingly. Plus if you line up your pieces in sequence you can ensure that you're the one benefiting the most out of this action.

I think as I was discovering and learning how to play the game, I was more focused on the Build action. The game tells you to be focused on it because each department has two action spots for building the instruments. As well as there often is a race to build the instruments since they often score in very area majority ways, each featuring their own rule or mini game for one time scoring.

However, I think the main strategy is to actually go slower and take more turns of the different actions - by that I mean use Inspect actions between Build actions to get residual points and ideally get workers too. Because that's the thing, when you use workers they go onto your player board, but you can only have 10 resting workers. If you use workers and your board is full then they're lost when spent. On the other hand, you get workers any time your die is used, and since anyone can use your die sometimes its good to have your dice in a favorable position for someone to use for the action.

And this is why I think it may not fully work well at 2 players, as you're going to be focused on using your own dice for gaining workers and making it stronger or getting it to the break room. There's less incentive to just give your opponent progress on the die as well as a worker outside of their turn. There's a neutral "bot" player for 2 players that's meant to help make progress on instruments, go up on tracks and give the players other options for actions, but otherwise they're just there to interfere.

The one positive thing is that it gives an interesting puzzle with the varied instruments, each having their own mini game for how they work for scoring. Execution of play for the game is really straight forward, even though how to earn meaningful points feels a little esoteric the first time around. I think this game might play better at a higher player count, at least for possibly better interaction. This one is a wait-and-see for if it stays in the collection.