Players: 2-5
Playing Time: 30-45 minutes
The Components
Flat Acting comes in a long game box with:
Game Boards: A set of four game boards, each depicting different areas to be controlled. They're all printed on thick cardboard with a high-gloss finish.
The four boards show: a graveyard, a party, a dusty main street, and some buildings and alleys. Each one contains five areas and each of those areas shows a value, from 3-11.
The artwork on all of those locations is fairly basic, but it features the same cartoony style that I think is used to even better effect on the playing pieces and cards.
Playing Pieces: 50 actors (or props) printed on glossy cardboard. 45 of them have plastic stands so that you can stand them up, while the last 5 are meant to be laid on the ground.
There are 10 pieces for each of the genres (western, detective, romance, horror), plus another 10 pieces for crew members. Each of these five types is shown by an obvious background color. There's also a number, which shows the piece's value.
As noted, they all have cartoony art which is generally charming.
Other Cardboard Bits: THere are also 6 critic tokens and 4 lock tokens, which are likewise printed on gloss cardboard.
Cards: Finally, the game contains 78 cards, all printed on sturdy glossy cardstock. 60 of them are genre cards, used to place the various characters and props and 12 are special rewrite cards. There are also 5 cards used to determine who is which genre (or crew) at the start of the game, plus 1 turn summary card.
These are all good-quality and once more attractive because they repeat the nice artwork from the characters. The rewrite cards are identified by icons, and initially some of those were a bit murky, but we quickly figured them out.
Also of note is the fact that Flat Acting comes with a tuckbox to hold your cards in. I wish more games did this, as I get tired of storing my cards in zip-lock bags!
Overall, Flat Acting contains attractive pieces that are very good quality and fairly easy to use. Its Style is also helped by the fun "drama" mechanic in the game, which encourages players to narrate the action for their card plays and adds a lot of color to the game. I've thus given it a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Game Play
The object of Flat Acting is to gain the most points through the control of various movie sets, using the actors and props from your genre.
Setup: Each player randomly selects one of the genres. (In a five-player game, one person also plays the crew "genre".) The four game boards are laid out in such a way that entrances and exits connect them.
Order of Play: On a turn a player does the following:
- Draw Card(s).
- Play Casting Card.
- Optionally, Play Rewrite Card(s).
Draw Card: A player draws a card from the deck. If it's a rewrite card, he puts it in front of him and redraws, continuing until he gets a casting card.
Play Casting Card: Once a player has a casting card, he must play it. Most cards show a genre and a value from 1-5; they also show the two actors of that value in that genre. A player may do one of two things:
- Take one of the displayed actors from off-board and place it in a room on-board; or
- Take one of the displayed actors from on-board and move it to an adjacent room through a red doorway.
Wild Cards. There are also several wild cards for each genre, which let you place or move any actor from that genre.
The Drama Requirement. I mentioned earlier that I thought the "drama" rule worked well to give the game more color. This is it. When you place or move an actor, you explain the placement or movement by sort of telling the story of the scene you're putting together.
For example, "The priest stands in the park, looking somewhat nervous", as one player puts the priest in one of the park spaces. Then, "Suddenly, the priest's fears are proven true!" when a vampire joins in him the same space on a later turn.
There's also a minor penalty if you forget to dramatize.
(Of course, if this isn't your sort of thing, you can opt to exclude this rule in your game.)
Play Rewrite Cards: Finally, you have the option to play any rewrite cards in front of you (which you could have drawn on the current turn or on previous ones). These let you swap actors, move actors, lock scenes, and do other things.
Ending the Game: The game ends when a player draws a casting card and can't place or move any of the actors from it. At that point, scoring occurs.
Scoring. Each room is worth a number of points equal to its value. These points go to the genre with the highest total value of actors in the room. However, if there's a tie in a room, then the tied genres just lose out; instead, the points for the room go to whichever genre is next.
There are also a few rewrite cards that give points.
Whoever has the highest total wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Flat Acting is a majority-control game with tightly constrained placement rules for the majority-control tokens and unusual scoring rules (via the rules about ties). I immediately thought of games like Gangster, which similarly has constrained placement and scoring rules which produced interesting tacts.
However, after actually playing Flat Acting, I learned that it was really chaotic because of the serious restrictions on what you could play that are imposed by your (random) card draw. As such I think it tends more toward light/chaotic majority-control like Mission: Red Planet, but it's even more chaotic/light than many of those.
The Game Design
When talking about the design of Flat Acting, it's really that lightness and that chaotic nature that comes to the forefront.
On the one hand, that means that the game is easy to learn and easy to play. You can pretty quickly make most decisions, and it's entirely easy to play the game with family or kids.
On the other hand, that means the game doesn't have a lot of strategic depth. The random card draws can affect a game a lot, because it could result in your genre just never coming out. Similarly, it wouldn't be that odd for you to not get to place more than one of your genre over the course of the game.
(I'll also comment that these issues decrease as your number of players does; I suspect the most strategic player count is probably 3.)
Don't think that there's no strategy at all. You can still do a lot with the placement of other genres' pieces, thanks to the rules about ties, but even in that you're ultimately bound by what cards you draw.
I offer this as neither a positive or negative. Whether you like light and chaotic games will control much of whether you like this game. I suspect it'll be great for those aforementioned family gaming sessions and for folks looking for a pure fun game, but Euro-gamers will probably not be as enthused.
However, there is one (minor) aspect that genuinely bugs me about the game: the end game. It's too easy for it to be over too quickly. Hypothetically, you could have a game end on the third turn, though that's very unlikely. In any case, it'll probably end a lot faster than you expected, and perhaps too fast to get any real strategy done.
All said and done, I think Flat Acting is a fair majority-control game. I've thus given it an average "3" out of "5" for Substance. As I've already said, however, the fun dramatizations can raise your enjoyment of the game (and that's already been reflected in the Style).
Conclusion
Flat Acting is a fun and light majority-control game that will probably be enjoyed most by families and by gamers looking for casual fare.
