Car Boot Casino at the V&A
Last night (Friday 27th March 2026) I was privileged to demo my current game design project, a card game based around making a band, at the V&A Friday Late. It was the second Car Boot Casino, after a standalone event in Brighton during Develop last year. This time round we were in the V&A cafe, a very cool space although not always the best acoustically.
The game itself is tentatively titled "Artists and Repertoire" or "The Best Band in Market Harborough" and players are playing cards in different suits representing musical instruments in a rock band - vocals, lead guitar, bass, drums etc - who also have stats in three different categories. Each round the lead player will choose a category and then in sequence everyone will play a card of a different suit (you can't have two of the same instrument in a band!) and then in order of the lead player's chosen category players will select one of the musicians to add to their private set. At the end players must build the best band they can out of the musicians they collected, while still following the rule of not having two of the same instrument.
I've been working on the design for about a year - it actually started as a game about home maintenance where the cards were plumbers, electricians, etc but I essentially split the design into two different branches, one simpler and one more complex, and changed the theme for the former to the band idea as it is today.
It was great to show the game off to lots of people with varied experience of "modern" board games. I'm pretty happy with the design now, I am planning to write up the rules properly and make some basic prototypes to pitch to publishers.