Hello, Dear Readers!
Have you found your life musically lacking? Do you enjoy musical mashup mixes? Have you ever wondered, what exactly does Sia’s Chandelier vocals sound like when backed up by the bass line from LMFAO’s Sexy And I Know It? Well wait no longer! Allow me to introduce you to a brand new phenomenon: DropMix by Harmonix.
Now, if Harmonix sounds familiar, that would be either because you already know about DropMix and are here to see if I say anything new or shiny about it OR because you’re more familiar with their earlier game: Rock Band. Instead of giving each player a different instrument and playing through a song, the game functions around mixing together parts from different songs. To do this, each player has a deck of cards that they draw from and play. These cards are actually pretty clever and interesting, so let’s take a closer look.
The Parts and Pieces
The cards are the size of normal playing cards and most of that is taken up by a picture. These pictures are unique to each card and can be fun to look at on their own. The two critical pieces of information on most cards, though, is easily discernible in the top left corner: the color and power level. The color represents what type of card it is and there are six of them: Yellow – Lead/Vocal, Red – Melody, Blue – Rhythm, Green – Bass, Rainbow – Wild, and White – Effects. These colors represent where the cards can be played on the board, which has spaces corresponding to the first four colors. Wild and Effects cards can be placed anywhere. The difference is that Wild cards contain all the parts of the song, while the Effects cards will change something about the current song (changing the tempo, adding a sound effect, changing the key). There are only three power levels on the other hand, marked by how many bars are filled in, but it’s important since a card can’t be played over a card that is stronger than it.
The rest of the information on the cards is good to know, but not always needed for play. This includes the name of the song and artist, what playlist it belongs to (and I’ll get to those later), and what instrument it is. The last thing that each card has is hidden within the card: an NFC chip that tells the app which sample to play.
“Wait, an app? You never mentioned any app!”
Why, I just did! There are two major parts to this game besides the cards: the board and the app. The board is fairly simple; it has five spaces to put cards down, a mixer button (which does different things depending on the game mode), and the Bluetooth and NFC sensors. The spaces one the board are yellow/red, red, red/blue, blue, and blue/green. The spaces with two colors can have either one in that location and if the card is wild, it will play both types of samples. The app needs to be installed on a Bluetooth capable phone or tablet; it’s what plays the music and runs the game.
Playlists are a set of fifteen cards that all have the same symbol in the lower right. The songs within a playlist will mostly conform to the same genre: Pop, Hip-Hop/Rap/R&B, Rock, Dance/Electronic, or Country. The main box comes with four of these, one for each category but Country. These playlists are the easiest way to play quickly, since each playlist is a valid deck for a single player. However, you can and are encouraged to mix and match and build your own deck! Additionally, there are two options to get more playlists: Playlist Packs and Discovery Packs. Playlist Packs are exactly what they say on the tin; containing all fifteen cards within a playlist. Discovery Packs, however, are released as a set of six packs of five cards. These cards will belong to one of four playlists unique to that set and one other.
The Game Modes
DropMix currently has three play modes: Clash, Party, and Freestyle.
Clash is the competitive variant; two teams of one or two players face off, trying to get to 21 points first. Players get three cards if they are in a team of two and five if they are a team of three. Each team will get two plays per turn. Playing a card will always give a point, while playing a color that is currently not on the board or controlling all five spots on the board will gain an additional point. Effects cards will have a special effect; examples include letting the team play another card, giving bonus points based on card or instrument types, or removing points from the other team. Players may also press the DropMix bar to have a chance to remove the other teams card based on power levels. At the end of the turn, the team members will draw either one (for two player teams) or two (for single players).
Party is a cooperative mode for one to five players held over a series of rounds. The goal is to get the highest score possible. During each round, the system will display some kind of requirement for a card. For example, it may ask for a red card, a card at power level two, a card with a guitar part, or pressing the DropMix bar. The faster a card matching all of the requirements is played, the more points the players will earn. Each round will have multiple requests and if your team does well enough, you’ll get a bonus round to earn even more points.
Freestyle is true to its name, none of the rules apply here. You can play any card in any slot. Weaker cards can be played over stronger cards. The other big difference is that the players can modify the key and BPM. Pressing the DropMix bar will shuffle those two settings at random. There also isn’t a player limit in this mode so as many of your friends can join in. This is also where the most musical shenanigan-ing can happen. Do you want to know what five different drumlines sound when lined up? How about four conflicting vocal parts and a tambourine?
An additional feature, which can be triggered during any of these modes, is the ‘Save Mix’ feature. At any time, players may choose to save the current mashup. From there, it can be loaded within the app or shared without needing any of the other equipment. Have a really awesome mix that you are proud of? Save it to the app. Have a terrible, mind crushing, ear screeching mix that you want to use to haunt your friends dreams? Save it to the app. Then probably hide from them after you play it.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I found the DropMix system to be interesting, innovative, and fun to play around with. Unless you are really interested in mashups or music though, I would not whole-heartedly recommend it. The current price for the primary system on Amazon right now is about $55-60. After that, each complete playlist is going to cost about $15 MSRP. Either $15 for a playlist pack or $5 per discovery pack, with four playlists split across each set of the twelve packs in each set of two series.
Setting aside the cost of getting into it, the actual gameplay is not extremely engaging. There are few interesting or deep choices to be made while during play. While the deckbuilding aspect can help make this up somewhat, truly engaging in that aspect requires multiple people to buy into the game and the decks will still remain fairly shallow. The DropMix system feels more like a platform for musical shenanigans; some of the most fun I had with it was messing around with friends in Freestyle while we were waiting for everyone to arrive.
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