Players: 4-10
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes

The Components

Cineplexity comes in a dense box jam packed with 504 cards.

The Cards: The Cineplexity cards are straight-cornered, very sturdy cardstock cards. They're also very basic. A one-color background and a simple icon identifies the category of each card, while some bold text in the middle of the card presents the clues. The cards are thus simple and utilitarian.

Trays: The game also comes with sturdy plastic trays, which make it easy to hand the cards around the table and keep them all neat.

Rules: A double-sided rule sheet printed on glossy cardstock. The rules are clear and easy to learn from.

Even moreso than is usually the case, this new Out of the Box release is very minimalistic, with simple, unadorned components. However even moreso than is usually the case, you also get a ton of stuff in this box; it's dense and heavy.

I've thus given Cineplexity an average "3" out of "5" for Style: low beauty but great value.

The Gameplay

The object of Cineplexity is to successfully identify movies from pairs of clues.

Order of Play: On his turn the "director" reveals cards until players can identify a movie based on these clues; directorship then shifts clockwise.

Drawing Cards: The first director will draw two cards and place then face-up on the table in front of him; later directors will only draw one card, because there will already be one card face-up (as we'll see).

Each card has a category such as "theme", "scenes", "production", "props", "actors", "characters", or "critiques". Each card also has a clue that goes with that category. For example one character card says "with a limp or phobia" while one production card says "contains a flashback".

Once the director has revealed the cards the other players then try and be first to name a movie that meets the criteria on both cards. For the above two cards, The Usual Suspects might fit.

The director is the arbiter of who has guessed a correct movie. When someone has he awards them the older card of the two in front of him as a point. The next director then takes the remaining card and flips a new one up.

Failing to Guess: if no one can guess an acceptable movie, the director flips a third card face up. The players now only need to meet the criteria on two of the three cards.

If players still can't guess, the director tosses out all three cards, and starts with two new ones.

Winning the Game: A player wins the game when he's earned 6-10 cards (depending on the number of players in the game).

Relationships to Other Games

Cineplexity looks very much like it was an attempt to make another game in the mold of Out of the Box's very successful Apples to Apples.

The Game Design

If you are a serious movie buff, and you game with other serious movie buffs, Cineplexity is the game for you. Run, don't walk, out to buy it. The cards are clever enough to make you stretch your brains to figure out these movies, and you'll all have a lot of fun doing so.

I can't suggest the game quite as enthusiastically to people who aren't movie buffs or who don't play games with other movie buffs.

On the one hand the game is a trivia game. That implicitly causes it to have it own advantages and disadvantages. Prime among them is that there will be notable disparity between people with very different knowledge levels. You probably already know whether you like trivia games or not.

However the element in the game that I find more troublesome is that it's entirely player moderated. Players may make guesses based on vague recollections, then a director will have to determine whether those answers were right or wrong, no matter how good (or bad) his own knowledge of movies is. This resulted in lots of "So how did movie X have element Y?" as we played. Perhaps a more social group might have turned that around into a general discussion of movies, and perhaps that's even the intent, but for gameplaying--even social gameplaying--this level of vagueness is somewhat troublesome.

Despite those complaints I did have fun when I played. I've thus given Cineplexity an average "3" out of "5" for Substance, with the additional note that true film fans would easily give it a full "5" out of "5".

Conclusion

This Apples to Apples-like movie game will be of huge interest to serious movie fans, but will be harder to play for the rest of us.

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