I bought this at full price and then returned it to get it at at the Amazon price.
The tl;dr is that I do see a good chance of this hitting 50 bucks at clearance or even just a sale and for a bunch of people that's going to be the better price for the typical reasons you avoid these things (novelty, eats up space, can't find time or reason to play). If you think you would like it though you'll probably love it as it does what it says it does almost perfectly.
In terms of the actual game I'm extremely impressed but here are my pros and cons as someone who actually bought this and not a blogger who go it for free.
Pro
-the techonology behind the game feels like magic. The NFC reads an entire deck without a ton of issues. The music dynamically changes with mostly amazing results (sometimes the BPM destroys the sample, especially with vocals). The game auto tracks all scoring, turns, etc. making the actual game extremely easy to follow.
-the board, app, and everything is extremely well made.
-the synergy of the music changing as you play the game is pretty amazing. It's weird to play a card game that makes you feel like a DJ in the background is changing music as you play to make play more dramatic.
-the song choice seems quite good, even as a curmudgeon who almost never listens to the stuff included.
-there's a decent amount of support for saving mixes though I'm not sure who the target is as people who want to actually make music probably want something more legitimate creating purposes.
Con
-outside of the base game it's a dollar a card before discount. Even worse is the cards are not made to handle the NFC embedded so they are warped out of the box.
-do you want to play a music game at a party through phone speakers? No? own a good bluetooth speaker? No? Your board game just doubled in price.
-big plastic board, bigger than most board games and likely not going to store easily with other board games.
-it's a board game that is meant to be loud. The whole reason I bought this is to test this for a family member who loves dance music. His wife, however, hates the stuff so I'm not sure the game would ever get played. This game is kinda for a weird audience imo.
-the actual game rules are a bit of a mess. Everything is really simple but the strategy (in my two games played with my son) involved using a decent amount of randomness. Cards a incredibly simple outside of select few that are extremely crazy in what they do. It seems like play is going to be around planning and executing around special cards that comprise maybe 20% of the deck.
Sorry if this is useless info but I found most reviews glowing and uncritical. I'm happy I bought it at 75 bucks and I'm buying more cards but I'm a huge Harmonix fan and this is an interesting way to introduce some technical aspects of music to my kids.
