Back to the boardgame café.
A game that was on my "view at Essen" list, but is here already:
Rock Hard:
1977.
This may be the most thematic game I've ever played. Although the core
mechanism is worker placement, every time we did something and there
was a consequence, it was easy to imagine what kind of real-world
event it might represent. (Drugs are universally referred to as
"candy", which solves the problem of blue-nosed objectors while also
being amusing for everyone else.)
Mechanically there's nothing complicated, though we felt the candy
rules could have used some clarification. (But I didn't have a
thorough look through the rulebook at the time; generally it seemed to
be well laid out and easy to find things, and while the ruling I was
looking for isn't quite explicit it does seem clear.)
My slight concern is that there may only be one real path to victory:
get some skills, demo tape, record deal to get some income coming in,
give up your day job, up your skills to improve your deal, hire crew,
play bigger venues. But this was just a first game and we took at
least slightly divergent paths to get there.
At three players we didn't use the after-hours events much (these both
give some immediate effect and count towards set collection goals) and
I suspect this would be better with 4-5.
Even though we took over two hours to learn and play, we all felt
enthusiastic about playing again, and this has moved to my "buy" list.