Dropmix is a hybrid game that uses a smart phone/tablet app, a deck of custom cards, and a proprietary device. It's a high startup cost (though that was hardly a barrier for Rock Band), yet each piece is an important part of the whole.
The cards represent stems of songs. A card might be the lead vocals from Sia's Chandelier, the bass line from Cake's Short Skirt/Long Jacket, or the drums from Run-D.M.C.'s It's Tricky. Each card is illustrated with interesting original artwork, rarely a literal representation of the song, but a fun riff on the tone or flavor.
The device is the "game board." It has five slots where players play the cards, each slot color-coded to permit only one or two of the possible kinds of stems. There's a slot where only percussion is allowed, a slot that will take any lead part (vocals, guitar, keys, what-have-you), and so forth. The board is capable of reading radio tags cleverly hidden inside of the cards, and reacts to what gets played, turning each slot the color of the card that's there. It also connects via Bluetooth to your smart device, which is the most important piece of the puzzle.
The app does real time mixing of all the cards in play, actually playing the stems of the songs and manipulating them to fit together. The first card played sets the tempo and key, the template by which your custom masterpiece can emerge, mixing up to five song stems together into music. As cards come and go, parts of the music come and go, giving you the experience of being a DJ, and drilling down into songs to highlight their constituent parts. And somehow it always sounds good -- there's some amazing tech here, and (I suspect) careful curating of the total pool of songs available. All together, it feels like a magic trick.
What it doesn't really feel like is a game. There are two modes you can play (beyond simply free-styling with the board to create your own mixes). One is a cooperative mode, where the app prompts you ("Simon Says" style) to play a card with certain characteristics as quickly as possible. The other is a head-to-head mode where you score points by taking control of different parts of the mix.
It's not that there's no thought put into these games; there actually are some balancing elements, like a catch-up mechanism to eliminate powerful cards that can dominate the mix for too long. It's just that the games are super-shallow, operating at an Uno or Fluxx kind of level. You can argue the game has to be on that order of complexity for the sake of mass market appeal, and you'd probably be right. The music is the star here, and the average person thinks of Monopoly when they think "game." But the strategy here is minimal, repetitive, and unsatisfying. When I tried Dropmix out with friends, the initial shock of just what the game could do lasted about 3 minutes. After about 3 more minutes, it seemed like nobody really cared if they ever saw the thing again.
It certainly doesn't have the staying power of Rock Band. You don't truly engage with the music on as deep and personal a level. And the diversity just isn't there. Even if you splurge on new cards with new song components, you'll quickly get tired of mashing up the same few pieces over and over again. And it's less compelling still the less you know of the music that is included. The pairing of stems is so seamless that if you don't really know what was part of one song and what was part of another, you won't be able to identify them as separate in a resulting mix.
Ultimately, Dropmix feels like a clever tech demo. Something fun and incredible might be built using it, but this isn't it. That brief, visceral thrill you get when you first interact with it might be enough for me to grade it something like a C-, but I certainly can't recommend it.
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