The Big Time! Rulebook

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

• Overview of Play
• Components
• Game Preparation
• Round Preparation
• Gameplay
  • Some Notes on Money
  • Buying Talent
• Phase One: First Talent Buy
• Notes on the Talent Buy Phases
• Phase Two: Second Talent Buy
• Phase Three: Final Talent Buy
• Phase Four: Box Office
• Phase Five: Public Opinion
• Phase Six: Posterity Points
• Phase Seven: Cleanup & Hall of Fame
• Game End

Overview of Play

Each round is broken into seven Phases:

In Phases 1 through 3 (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), theater owners (that is to say: you and your fellows) send talent buyers to the Booking Office with fistfuls of cash to secure acts for the weekend's show.

In Phase 4 (Friday night), shows open and Box Office returns are totaled; players tot up values of the Playbills they've assembled.

Come Saturday evening after the last curtain falls--that's Phase 5--the heavy hand of Public Opinion falls upon us; acts involved with successful shows rise in popularity and acts that flopped fall in public estimation.

Phase 6 is a contemplative phase, a quiet Sunday morning when theater owners reflect upon their achievements and theaters are evaluated for their inclusion of popular act types, securing their reputations in perpetuity. (Read: Posterity Points (Read: Victory Points) are awarded.)

Monday morning finds stagehands sweeping aside the detritus of bygone shows, making ready the theaters for another week's work. This is Phase 7, Cleanup, where Playbills are cleared in preparation for the coming week.

At the end of the fourth week's Scoring, whomsoever has amassed the most Posterity Points wins!

Components

• Main Game Board, in three sections: Popularity Chart, Posterity Track, and Booking Office
• Four Theater Playbill Mats, with matching Posterity Markers
• 24 Headliner Act Cards: four of each Act Type in values between 5 and 8
• 24 Trouper Act Cards: four of each Act Type in values between 1 and 4
• Penalty Markers, for underpaid acts
• Big Time Money!: 48 cards in denominations of 1, 2, and 3, plus one "Bonus" card of each value
• The Hook!: the greatest ignominy in vaudeville; woe betide its unlucky recipient
• Four Review Cards, with values ranging between 1 and 4 stars
• Popularity Markers, to mark the vagaries of public opinion; in six types: Variety, Animal Acts, Magicians and Ventriloquists, Acrobats and Jugglers, Comedians, and Musicians

Game Preparation

1. Place the Main Game Board to the left of center, leaving room for a card tableau.
2. Assign each player a Theater Playbill Mat according to their wont and place it in front of them, and place the matching Theater Marker beneath the Posterity Point track on the main board.
3. Dole out an allotment of Big Time Money! to each player, four of each denomination to a total of $24. This is a fixed amount, and will not change over the four rounds of play. ($24 may not sound like much, but in 1912 dollars, it's worth...about $550... OK, yeah, it's not much.)
4. Randomly place the six Act Type Markers on the starred spaces of the Public Opinion track.
5. Lastly, give each player a Review Card at random. During the game, reviews will be assigned according to how well theaters perform, and are used to break ties. To offset the advantage given to unearned reviews during the first round, players receive bonus cash (Big Time Money! cleverly marked with "BONUS" in red type) to be used for the first round only. The Smash gets an extra $3, the Boffo show $2, and the So-So show $1. In games with less than four players, remove one or both of the two middling reviews, and only give out the lower-value bonus cash (i.e., in a three-player game, remove the Boffo review and only use the $1 and $2).

Round Preparation

To prepare for the first round (and each one subsequent):

1. Deal out a number of Headliners equal to the number of players plus one face-down, next to the "Coming Soon" slot in the Booking Agency (i.e., deal out five cards in a four-player game).
2. Deal out the same number of face-down Troupers atop each Headliner.
3. Lastly, deal a like number of face-up Troupers: one atop each stack next to "Coming Soon", and in rows next to the "Now Available - P.M." and "Now Available - A.M." slots.

These Acts constitute the pool of talent from which the current week's Playbills will be constructed.

Gameplay

The Big Time! is comprised of four rounds of play, each divided into multiple phases representing a day's labor in mounting a vaudeville show. The brunt of the game's decisions are found in the first three "Talent Buy" phases, where theater owners send their talent buyers to the Booking Agency with fistfuls of Big Time Money!, to return with acts for the round's show.

Some Notes on Money

Cash sent to the booking office on a given day is considered spent for the round. If a buyer is sent out with eight dollars and they only come back with six dollars' worth of talent, that's the cost of doing business! Since there are three Talent Buy phases, cash on hand will be divided into three portions, one for each phase. There is no need to retain cash after these phases are over, as money is replenished at the end of the round after the week's show has been completed.

While money already spent in a round and the number of Big Time Money! cards left in a player's hand are public information in theory, players are under no obligation to flaunt their wealth in a way that makes it easy for other players to get a read on their finances. If a player is asked directly how many cards they've left or how much they've spent so far, decorum dictates that this information be offered promptly and cheerfully, but this does not preclude cannier rascals from obfuscating the truth via posture and attitude.

Buying Talent

In the first two Talent Buy phases, theater owners will, through their talent buyer proxies, contract Troupers to perform at their theaters. Troupers are the workhorse acts who make up the greater part of the world of vaudeville, and the same Trouper acts will return in each round of play. The final Talent Buy phase will be for securing a Headliner. Headliners are star attractions, and each will appear but once in the game.

When a Playbill is complete, four of the five acts that comprise it will be Troupers, and the remaining act will be a Headliner. As acts are selected for Playbills, they should be placed from bottom to top, overlapping upwards as new acts are added. In this way, Playbills end up with a vaudeville poster-style display, with a picture of the Headliner on top!

Phase One: First Talent Buy

1. Each player commits money to buy TWO Troupers during the phase: one of these acts will be booked in the morning (the "Now Available - A.M." row) and one in the afternoon (the "Now Available - P.M." row). The minimum cost to contract an act is its numeric value in the lower-left corner of the act's card. Players make their bids secretly and simultaneously by selecting a number of Big Time Money! cards from their hands and placing them face-down on the table. After all players have committed their money, simultaneously reveal all bids.
2. The Booking Agent is greedy and readily bribed, so whoever has committed the most money this phase gets first pick of the acts in the "Now Available - A.M." row to add to his Playbill. In turn, each player chooses an act and places it in the lowest spot on their Playbill, paying its cost from the phase's cash allotment.
3. After the A.M. acts are chosen and placed, discard the remaining act in the row. With whatever money is left in this phase's bid after paying for players' first acts, determine selection order again for the "Now Available - P.M." acts. A player who had first choice in the A.M. half of the phase may well not have it in the P.M., depending on the cost of the first act they booked. Players select their second act in the same fashion as the first, placing it in the next highest position in their playbill.

Notes on the Talent Buy Phases

These rules apply to all three Talent Buy phases:

Breaking Ties: The Booking Agent is a bighearted man--all other things being equal--and wants to give the little guy a break, so ties are broken according to Reviews: whoever has the lousiest Review Card in front of them gets first pick.

Overpayment: Players must pay at least the value of an act to claim it, and each player must book the full five acts in each round. Change is never made; if a player commits but two Big Time Money! cards with values of $2 each (a bold and probably foolhardy action), and only "1" value cards are left to choose from, the player must overpay with a $2 bill. Write the overpayment off as the talent buyer's cut.

Underpayment: If a player doesn't have enough money to buy an available act card, they must select the lowest value card and add it to their Playbill. But if an act is underpaid, they will underperform! Take a Penalty Marker with a value equal to the difference between the act's value and what they were actually paid and place it on the act's card (i.e. if the act has a value of "3", but the player has only $1 left to pay for it, place a "-2" marker on the card in the player's Playbill).

Phase Two: Second Talent Buy

1. Set up the second Talent Buy phase by moving the face-up Trouper acts from the "Coming Soon" row to the "Now Available - A.M." row, then turn over the face-down Troupers and move them to the "P.M." row. Lastly, turn over the Headliner acts in place in the "Coming Soon" row.
2. Having so done, phase two proceeds exactly like phase one, securing the third and fourth acts on each Playbill. Players will do well to keep in mind that not only are they allotting money for their final Troupers, but they need to leave enough money to book their Headliner in the final Talent Buy phase.

Phase Three: Final Talent Buy

1. Each player reveals the money they have left after buying their four Troupers, and Headliner acts are selected in the mode of the first two phases.
2. Place the Headliner cards at the top of each Playbill, and theaters are ready to mount their shows!

Phase Four: Box Office

Now that each Playbill is completely filled, it's show time!

1. Each player adds up the values of the acts on his active Playbill to arrive at a Playbill Value. Be sure to subtract the value of any Penalty Markers accrued!
2. The public likes variety! If a Playbill has five unique act types, the Playbill Value is increased with a +1 bonus.
3. Compare Playbill Values: the player with the highest score is awarded the "Smash!" Review, the lowest gets the "Flop!" Middling scores, if any, receive the appropriate two- or three-star Review. In the case of ties, the higher Review is awarded to the player with the worst Review from the previous round; the public loves an underdog!
4. After the "Flop!" is assigned, the player who received it is subject to the greatest indignity in vaudeville: "The Hook!" Place the Hook marker on top of the lowest value act on your Playbill (taking into consideration any applicable Penalty Markers). This act will not be used in the last two phases. If the Flopped player has two acts of equally low value, they may choose which one gets The Hook.

Example: 16 (Base Value) - 1 (Penalty Marker) + 1 (Variety Bonus) = Playbill Value of 16.

Phase Five: Public Opinion

1. The player with a Smash! for this round goes first, moving the Act Type marker upward on the Public Opinion Chart for each Act Type icon on his Playbill (note that Headliner acts have double icons, and so will adjust the chart position twice). For each adjustment, move the marker a number of spaces according to the green upward arrows in the Public Opinion tier that the marker is on. If a marker is moved multiple times, use the movement value of the tier the marker is in when it begins each movement--the first move may be four spaces, from Small Time to Showtime, but the second will be three spaces since the marker is now moving while in the second tier.

Example: Assuming the example Playbill was rated a Smash!, the Public Opinion chart would be adjusted as follows. The Playbill has one each of Variety, Animal, Musical, and Juggling/Acrobatic acts, and moves the associated marker up once for each icon according to the arrows in the tier in which it began its movement. There are two Magician/Ventriloquist icons on the Headliner, so the marker moves up twice. Poor Comedians get no respect, and their marker stays in the Small Time.

2. Next, the Flop! adjusts the markers downward. The rules are the exact inverse of the Smash!, using the red downward arrows. Happily, one of the Flop's acts has already gotten The Hook!, so the damage is slightly ameliorated since that act won't affect the Public Opinion.

Phase Six: Posterity Points

1. After the Public Opinion chart has been affected by the Smash! and the Flop!, players move their Theater Markers on the Posterity Point Track. Theaters will be fondly remembered for booking acts that were popular at the time! Each act type icon on a Theater Mat--including acts in your Hall of Fame! (see below)--will score points according to its value on the Public Opinion chart: three points for acts in The Big Time, two points for acts in Hot Time, and one point for acts in Showtime. Small Time acts accrue no points for their bookers. Keep in mind that Headliners have two icons, and thus will always score twice. If a player scores more than thirty points, flip their Theater Marker to the "+30" side and continue around the Posterity Point track.

Scoring Example: The Haymarket Playbill has two Magician/Ventriloquist icons; since Ventriloquists are in Hot Time, they score a total of four points. Animal Acts are also in Hot Time, so one icon scores two points. Variety and Jugglers are in Showtime, so they score one point apiece for each of the icons on the Playbill. Musicians are in The Big Time!, so the single icon on the Playbill scores three points. There are two Comedian icons in the Haymarket's Hall of Fame, but Comedy is still in the Small Time, so it scores no points. 4 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 3 = 11 points total for the Haymarket, and they move their Theater Marker eleven spaces on the Posterity Point track.

Phase Seven: Cleanup & Hall of Fame

To finish the current round, players clear their Playbills in readiness for the next.

1. Troupers from active Playbills are discarded into the Trouper deck, which is then reshuffled.
2. Headliners are moved to a theater's Hall of Fame. Theaters will hang photos in their lobbies and bask in the reflected glory of the big name stars who have trod their boards! Though Hall of Fame Headliners do not add to the value of a round's active Playbill in future rounds, their Act Type icons do continue to score Posterity Points for the rest of the game. In conjunction with Headliners' double scoring, this gives theater owners a strong vested interest in developing the popularity of acts in their Hall of Fame (and in sabotaging the popularity of their rivals' Hall of Fame acts).
3. Any Penalty Markers on an act are removed, and each player's Big Time Money! supply is replenished.

After cleaning up, reset the Booking Agency and proceed to the next round of play! Unless the fourth round just finished, in which case it's time for the Game End.

Cleanup Example: The Headliner is moved to the Hall of Fame; the Troupers go back to the deck to be shuffled and reused in the next rounds.

Game End

After four rounds, whoever is farthest along on the Posterity Point track is the winner! In case of a tie, tied players should score all acts in their Hall of Fame again and compare scores anew. If players are still tied, the player with the lowest Review in the final round of play is the winner!