Dance Card does not look like many of the other games on my shelf. In fact, the reaction of most of my friends when they saw the box was one of laughter. It turns out though, that there’s a surprising amount of game inside the box.
In Dance Card, players are High School students on their way to the Freshman dance, and each student has identified 3 other students that they wish to Dance with. The game can be played solo, just controlling a single student, cooperatively as you each try to get your dances in before time runs out, or – for the full bratty teenager experience – competitively as you not only try to get your 3 dances done, but try to thwart others at the same time.
What’s in the box?
Component quality in Dance Card is really good – there’s a large board, numerous standees to represent the staff and students of this particular high school, a few decks of cards, and a selection of cardboard chits and tokens. More-or-less everything is done with bright, bold colours, the graphic design is really nice and clean, and the iconography is pretty simple: it’s hard to find fault with the production here. The cast of students has a fairly broad, diverse spectrum – with plenty of ethnicities and orientations depicted – the biggest complaint I’ve seen levelled at the student body is that they’re all a bit too attractive and mostly pretty slim, but I still think that the overall picture is a pretty good one.
The large selection of Standees representing students and faculty gives Dance Card a nice table presence – although some players commented that it can be a bit hard to spot where a given student is on the board, and that flat cardboard discs with the character’s face, number and colour would have done the job better. Ultimately, the game has focused on looking good, and I don’t think it detracts too much from the play experience once you get to recognise the various students.
So what am I trying to do?
At its simplest level, to win a game of Dance Card, you need to complete 3 successful “Dance actions” – get your student onto a dance floor with a prospective partner, roll some dice, and hope that you get enough of the required symbols. Each of your 3 partners will have a different requirement for a successful roll – typically just a number for the first one, then higher numbers and additional symbols required as you go along.
Where the meat of the game is in Dance Card, is the manouvering that goes on prior to making the dance roll. Simply turning up will probably only get you one or 2 dice, unlikely to be enough for anything but the easiest roll – you’re going to need to do a bit of preparation.
Friends…
First of all there are your friends – and your partner’s friends. Simply having your friends present is enough to add a dice to the roll (generally 1 or 2 die per friend, of which you have 2). For your partner’s friends, you’ll have to work a little harder – find them on the Bleachers or in the Refreshments, and use an action to “chat” with them, allowing you to place a token on their space on the card – once the token is placed, future attempts to dance with that partner will add an extra dice for each one. Lastly, keep an ear out for the music – if the tunes currently playing match their favoured genre, that will add another dice too (the extra “music rules” cards in the deluxe/expansion content mix this up a bit).
… and enemies
Sadly, it’s not all about friends and bonuses – this is the cliquey world of High School social politics after all, and there are as many folk ready to thwart you as assist you. Each student has a “Rival” and their presence on the dance floor is enough to add a black penalty die to your roll, its numbers and symbols subtracting from the total. Worse, each of your partners has a crush on one of the other students, and having that student present when you ask for the dance will also add a penalty.
Bust some Moves
Sometimes you’ll roll those dice – or be about to roll those dice – and just not be in the position to get all the symbols you need. Smooth Moves cards are your friend here – some are played before the roll to add dice, whereas others can be used after the dice results are visible, to manipulate them – discarding certain dice to gain other results, or simply to re-roll something.
One of the things that I found a little frustrating in the games we played was that it can be a little difficult to get hold of Smooth Moves cards a lot of the name, unless you happen to have selected a student who gets them for free. The expansion/deluxe content certainly helps with this (the alternative music spinners interact a fair bit more with Smooth Moves cards, as well as adding some new cards that offer extra options), but I think it could have added to the game to have seen an option to to go to a particular location and take an action to draw a card, or similar.
Take a breath, try again
With any luck, you’ll have prepared sufficiently well that your dance roll goes off without a hitch, but sometimes – even with the best preparation – the dice just aren’t your friends and, especially on later rolls where you’re looking for specific symbols as well as high numbers, you might find yourself red-faced with the embarrassment that comes with failure.
Once there is a failure token on your board, you can’t ask that student to dance again – at least not until you’ve had a chance to recover and regroup. You’ll need to move your student to the Restrooms or the Janitor’s closet and take a “Nerve” action to clear those tokens before going back round again.
Whose side are you on?
Dance Card can be played solo, cooperatively, or in competitive mode. In solo or co-op mode, all the players win as soon as everyone has completed their dances, whereas in the head-to-head version, the first person to get all their dances done is the winner.
In my experience the co-op/solo version is easy to understand, and relatively easy to win: the only real obstacle that you’ll be facing is the periodic redistribution of students via the Mix It Up cards, and you can usually get yourself into a strong position to make a roll.
In the competitive version of Dance Card, Mix It Up cards will be played far less often, and it’s down to the players to mess with each other’s plans. Sometimes this will just happen organically – the potential partner that you want to dance with happens to be the crush of the person your opponent is trying to dance with, giving them a penalty dice. However, I think that the game gets a lot more interesting (if potentially quite mean) when players embrace the spite, the snark and the general backstabbing of teenage cliques and really lean into the theme, actively taking time on their own turns to foil the plans of others.
Obstacles?
In solo or co-op mode, Dance Card is purely a Player(s) vs Environment game, but the environment certainly has ways of spoiling your plans. At the start of each turn you will advance the music spinner, and resolve events based on the symbol you uncover. Most commonly, this will be in the form of “Mix it Up” cards, which will move students around – each student standee has a number and a colour, and this will be used to move them between Dance Floors, in and out of the resting areas, and sometimes it will simply bring your rival straight to you.
There’s a definite element of luck in this part of the game: sometimes an ill-timed Mix It Up card will completely scupper a well-laid plan, and others it will fail to impact you at all. This is all just part of the charm of the game though, something intentionally fairly light and subject to chance, rather than a puzzle that can be completely mathed out.
Extra Challenge?
If you find the co-op or solo experience a bit on the easy side, Dance Card comes with various challenges that you can add to the game in order to increase the difficulty. The most straightforward are the Chaperones who move around the Dance Floor, impervious to the players’ ability to move students, and automatically adding penalty dice to any Dance Rolls that take place in their presence. There are also some more complex challenges, depending on how far you want to take things.
Final Thoughts
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by Dance Card. It’s definitely a light game, with a fair amount of chance, but there’s actually a reasonable amount of game going on underneath a theme which is quite brash, and definitely not my usual cup of tea. Now, I’m no expert when it comes to American High Schools – my knowledge is mostly derived from 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, (yes, I’m showing my age) and possibly Grease (no, I’m not that old) – but it felt like the game did a really good job of matching the theme, and feels pretty immersive with a small number of components.
The co-op and solo modes are definitely on the easier side if you play them in their most basic forms, but the addition of a few challenges soon sorts that out. In competitive modes, the game is as hard as you decide to make it, although you can still throw in a challenge or 2 if you feel like it. Right now, the distributor is still shipping out copies of the Deluxe version which includes extra components (essentially an expansion within the main box) that help add variety to some of the more-limited aspects of the game, (the expansion will be available for sale separately later), but with or without the expansion there’s already a ton of replay value in here.
If you’re a gamer who fancies a change from Fantasy quests, foiling villainous plots, routing hordes of zombies, or trying to become the most successful businessman of the Industrial Revolution, then Dance Card offers something that feels fun and fresh, is likely to be very different to what you’re used to, and is surprisingly solid in terms of the underlying mechanics. Having reached the age, where most of the people I’m gaming with are closer to our children going to school discos than the distant memories of our own teenage years, I can see this being a big hit with kids who find some of the themes above boring, In fact, if you’ve got a fan of Teen High School tv shows in the house, who you’re trying to encourage to get into gaming, then you should probably rush out and buy this right now, as it’s approachable enough to be played by anyone, but has enough options to add difficulty and complexity to keep folks going for a while.
I was provided with a free copy of this game to review by TradeQuest. No money changed hands, and I was under no obligation to provide a positive review.
fistfulofmeeples 
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[…] has a cardboard rail around which the knights ride as they joust. Similarly, Fistful of Meeples wrote about Dance Card that “the large selection of Standees representing students and faculty gives Dance Card a nice […]
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