I have a bunch of instruments in my office: some whistles, a mandolin, a kalimba, and a couple of cats. I find that if I bang them into each other, it sounds like a car crash in slow motion—with cats. But in my head, it sounds like glorious, sweet music. I’ve been uploading the music I play into Suno, and it’s been turning it around and making me sound like a pro.
Unfortunately, I’ll never be good enough to be a bard in real life. But I do have Bardwood Grove, and that’s the next best thing.
In Bardwood Grove, you and up to three friends (four with the expansion, Spirits of Bardwood Grove—and yes, Kasul, it is on order) take on the personae of traveling bards who have come to the famed Bardwood Grove to prove to the world that nobody bards better than they do.
The game is played out over a year, with various bards making their appearances as the seasons change and others moving on. It can be played as a campaign game, slowly unlocking the bards and special events, or you can just play with everything from the start. We played it the slow way, and each time we played, there would be a new bard to choose, new mechanics, and what started out as a simple game became a lot deeper and more strategic as we finished out the year in the game and moved into the bonus packs that came with the Kickstarter edition.
At its heart, Bardwood Grove is a deckbuilding game. Your chosen bard starts off with a special power that only they can use; in the picture above, the bagpipe bard changes her melody to lyrics when she has no volume. More on all that in a moment. They also come with a superfan who knows all the words to all their songs, and a small deck of cards unique to the bard.
Your challenge, as a player, is to acquire additional cards so that… hold on, back up. Let me talk about how the game is played.
Turns switch between the Composition phase, where you are traveling around Bardwood Grove looking for inspiration, and the Singing phase, where you are performing your composition and reaping the rewards. Which phase you are in is controlled by the tempo wheel, which advances as you play cards. When it makes a full revolution, you enter a Singing phase.
During the Composition phase, you choose one of your two cards and add it to your song, and send the other to your discard pile, where it adds to your volume and spins your tempo wheel. You are trying not to enter the Singing phase until your song is just perfect, but you can only delay your performance for so long. During Composition, you can position yourself on the board so that your performance can be heard and seen by all the appropriate people, and also move your personal barge up along the River of Legends in order to unlock community scoring opportunities for all the players. You also get a bonus for helping the legends along.
In the Singing phase, you take the cards in your song and turn them into temporary resources—volume, melody, and lyrics—that are spent to gain victory points, pacify local woodland creatures, stun nearby bards with your clearly superior skills, and so on. This is the part of the game where you get to shine, and everyone is watching what you’re doing.
When you’re done, you draw back up to two cards and do any necessary actions while the next player goes about their turn.
Like Terraforming Mars, players in Bardwood Grove are mostly concerned with getting their own “engine” running well without really interacting with the other players. That said, there are plenty of opportunities to interact with the other players, but even then, it’s far more cooperative than you’d expect. The worst you can do is spend melody during your Singing phase to rob another bard of one of their tokens, which you can then use to help yourself out—but doing so actually helps the target bard win more victory points.
The various bards are goofy. It’s not always clear how best to use their unique powers, but once you’ve figured it out, it’s like a door opening into a room full of victory points. It’s a rising tide that lifts all the barges on the River of Legends, and everyone usually has fun.
Definitely recommended.
I have several more posts to write about Suno’s cover feature, which is ludicrously addictive, jaw-droppingly quirky and sometimes frustrating beyond belief. I’ve found that the first couple of tries on a particular upload tend to be the closest to what I was afterbut I can’t leave it alone because it’s so incredibly fascinating to hear my own songs done in any number of styles, exactly as if they really were being covered by all kinds of different bands.
That’s the “toy” part of it. The “tool” part is how it can come so extrmely close to the actual recordings, keeping all the phrasing, intonation and dynamics as well as the chords and the melody. When it gets that right it really does sound like what I was trying to get from playing with actual people all those years ago, or like the sound I heard in my head on the ones I never got as far as trying out on the various bands I was in. It’s also weird how similar the experience is to trying to get actual people to play or sing things like you damn well asked them to instead of wandering off into their own interpretations.
It’s still in beta, too. I can’t wait to see what it’s like when it’s finished.
It really is amazing. I’d post the music I uploaded vs the music Suno turned it into, but it would be more than a little embarrassing for me. I really like it — it’s hard to believe, listening to the finished product, that I had anything to do with the it, though I did.