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The intent of "Outside the Game Box" is to host game-related events that are not solely about playing games, although sometimes we will just play games. The first few events took place outdoors — a meet-and-greet, a disc golf outing at a nearby course followed by dexterity games at my place, and (the focus of this post) a game demo combined with related food.
Local designer Matt Wolfe knows my tastes, so he had put me in contact with designers Mark McGee and Joshua J. Mills, who were interested in showing me a highly tactical, highly interactive game prior to it being Kickstarted in mid-2021 by Talon Strikes Studios. Among the event ideas on our list, Linda and I had included "designer Q&A and game presentation", so we invited McGee and Mills to bring multiple copies of the game — Top Pop, in which you are trying to prove yourself the best owner of a soda company — and we organized a group of players and picked up two dozen sodas so that we could "live the theme" during the event.
We ended up having fifteen attendees, with groups playing the game once, then breaking for snacks and soda tasting — with us divvying a bottle into tiny cups so that whoever wanted could try the same soda at the same time — then redistributing for a second game, followed by more soda tasting, with a designer Q&A being sprinkled throughout all of that. The event went great and has inspired us to do more along these same lines. We've already hosted a chill A Gentle Rain + tea-tasting event, and in the autumn months we'll have a chili cook-off paired with Bohnanza.
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One dozen of the sodas we tried
As for the game, I've now played Top Pop four times on a mock-up copy from Talon Strikes, twice with three players and once each with four and five players. The game isn't currently described as a bidding game on the BGG game page, but it is 100% a bidding game in my mind, with players trying to have both majorities in various cities and diversity among the cities they've collected — although it's tough to have it all, which is the challenge of the game, of course.
The deck contains city cards numbered 3-9, with adjustments based on player count, and each city appears as many times in the deck as the number on it: three 3s, four 4s, etc. Within each number, one card is a night card with a different back, while all the other cards are day.
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Mock-up components
On a turn, you place a city card in front of yourself (gaining nothing) or in front of another player (gaining a token of their color). Then you claim a token of any color, often your own so that you can place bids. Then you can place bids on as many cards as you wish, after which you fill your hand to three cards. If you place a day card, it goes face up, whereas a night card goes face down and can be looked at only by the person who played it and the person it lies in front of, which might be the same person.
To place a bid, you put any number of tokens in a stack on the card with your color on top; if someone else has a high bid on the card, your bid must have more tokens than theirs and you must include their color in your bid, along with one token of your own color on top, effectively saying, "I know you are, but what am I?" If someone tops your bid, you can add to your initial bid, but you must once again include a token of their color and of yours.
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Two of the three active tables; again, mock-up components
At the start of your turn before doing anything else, if you have the high bid on a card, you claim that card. The high bid goes to the player who has the card in front of them — except that if the card is in front of you, the high bid goes to the bank. You cannot place a "bid" on what you're "selling", then keep both the item and the money. Again, the game doesn't talk about bidding and auctions, but I find it easier to process all the moving parts if I do think of it this way. Everyone else who has a bid on a claimed card takes back their stack, and now they have those tokens to use again on a future turn.
Managing your tokens — which will be plastic, stacking bottle caps in the published version of the game (KS link) — is the heart of Top Pop, just as money management is at the heart of any auction game. If you lack money, you lack power, and everything in the game will be determined by others for you.
You need tokens of your color to place bids, but you also need tokens of other colors to beat the bids of others. You might need to place a card in front of someone so that you can collect a token of their color and beat a high bid of theirs — but in doing so, you have likely guaranteed them future tokens when someone bids on and wins that card. You might want to place a card in front of yourself, then bid on it so that someone has to include your color to overbid, thereby giving you tokens for two possible bids in the future — but doing so locks your token out of play initially and the card might end up being more valuable than the tokens depending on the flow of the game.
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Mark McGee (l) and Joshua J. Mills
The game continues until someone claims their sixth card, and depending on how well they've managed bids, that might come sooner than expected. In a three-player game, for example, I managed to place four bids on a single turn, with three of those bids holding until my next turn, getting me to the six-card threshold. At that point, all players throw away all cards in hand and carry out only the final actions of a turn: claim a token of any color, then place as many bids as you like. After all players have had a chance to do this, gameplay ends, and cards still in play are awarded to the high bidders.
As for who wins, you score 2 points for each different city you have after the first. For each city, whoever has more cards than each other player scores 2 points per card; if players are tied for majority in a city, they each score 1 point per card. In the event of a tie — which seemed to happen often as high scores were typically 12-14 — whichever tied player has the most tokens wins.
More sodas — horchata was the winner of this lot
"Highly tactical, highly interactive" turned out to be exactly the right description of Top Pop, which forces you to adapt constantly based on what you see people play and bid on and win, not to mention which tokens they're collecting since that tells you where they can strike on their turn. Money flows in a tight system, and prolonged bidding wars can hurt the parties involved since they have neither won the card nor reclaimed their tokens for other bids — yet sometimes you're going to overbid because you think that card is precisely what you need, especially since not all cards get played and the night cards add uncertainty as to who has claimed what.
For more details on the gameplay and a visual sense of how money flows in the game, check out this video:
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