Review of Motion Pictures: Movies Out Of Cardboard

Blurb from the publisher: 'The strategy card game of movie making.

Live the experience of running a movie studio and claim Fame beyond measure!'

What you get: Your EUR 20 or equivalent will buy you Motion Pictures: Movies Out Of Cardboard, a hand-drafting and hand-management card game that accommodates two to four players in just over thirty minutes. In addition to the English rulebook, the game also contains the following: 86 Filmmaker cards (24 Starting, 62 Advanced), 80 Project cards (20 per Era), 4 Trilogy cards, 18 Goal cards (8 Big Goals, 10 Small Goals), 8 Player Aids and a Starting Player token.

Gameplay: In Motion Pictures players try to acquire Fame either through completing Projects, or allocating Filmmakers to the available Trilogy (and winning the Trilogy as a result of allocating the most skills), and fulfilling Goals Big and Small. The game lasts four rounds (Eras), each with its different Projects, with each round lasting several turns (minimum 6).

Each player starts with six Filmmakers, one from each available specialty (e.g. star, production, effects etc). On the board there will always be four open filmmakers for all to see, as well as the face-down Filmmaker deck. Out of these four, three at least must belong to different categories. One out of the four Trilogies is placed in the middle of the table. Depending on the number of players, a number of projects (6, 9 or 12) will be placed down in such a shape so that each player have three on his left and three on his right. Practically, this means that a player on a two player game will always interact with his opponent, on a three player game will directly interact with both his opponents but only partially, while on a four player game he will interact with one out of the three opponents only, but fully, like in the two player game. Also depending on the number of players an additional number of Projects will form the Project Deck each era. Two Big Goals and four Small Goals complete the setup.

On a given turn, a player can do one of the following three actions: Shoot, Hire or Recruit.

By Shooting, the player fields a Filmmaker in one of the Projects where he can (his three left ones, his three right ones, as well as the Trilogy). In addition to the specialty that each Filmmaker has, he also has one or more Skills and an ability. As an example, the Marketing Supervisor (Post Production specialty) has a TV and a clapperboard Skill, as well as an ability that allows the player to play extra Skills in a project. A Project on the other hand has requirements. These can be things like a star, a TV, a clapperboard etc. Depending on the Project, different things will be needed: Movies need Skills, Commercials need Specialties without Skills, TV Series need Specialties while actively excluding certain Skills, Awards require the precise amount of Skills and not more nor less, while the Trilogy rewards particular Skills and is a way for everybody to win Fame. Project also have an ability, that is triggered when they are completed. Filmmakers are placed on the side of the player that fielded them. This is not a cooperative game; you are actively competing against the other player(s) that have your left cards as right and vice versa, in order to conclude Projects before them. Once a Project is completed its ability is triggered, it is claimed by the person who completed it first, it is removed from the table and a new one from the Era takes its place. Every Filmmaker that was attributed to it is discarded on its owner's discard pile.

Hiring allows one of the following: either discard one Filmmaker to get an open one with the same Specialty, or Discard two Filmmakers to get an open one from any Specialty, or discard two to get the first hidden card from the Filmmakers deck. When an open Filmmaker is hired, he is replaced by the top card of the deck, always under the proviso that out of the four cards at least three categories will be represented.

Finally, Recruiting allows a player to discard a Filmmaker and draw from their draw pile. If they don't have one (and they don't at the beginning), then their discard pile is shuffled to form a draw pile.

An Era ends either when all players have passed due to having run out of cards, or when an Era pile runs out due to the completion of its Projects. In any event, all the players will have played the same amount of turns.

When a player accomplishes a Big or a Small Goal (e.g. complete first a number of projects or place first a number of Filmmakers on the Trilogy), he claims it for Fame. Goals are not replenished; when they are claimed they are gone for real.

The strong points: Now this is interesting; a light(ish) filler that is based on a mechanic that is definitely gamist, through planning via a finite, but not necessarily limited number of turns per round, which is settled upon through player interaction. Maybe the game is not that light after all!

Motion Pictures has some instant highlights. You try to win against everybody, but depending on the number of players, and always excluding the Hiring phase where your choice alters everybody else's, you might interact with only some of them. There is a definite time-pressure to perform. The advanced Filmmakers are better than the starting ones, or there's that certain effect that you would enjoy using to bring out a combo between a Filmmaker and a Project. There is however not that much of a time for that. While you are optimizing your hand, Projects might start getting claimed right under your nose. You might want to play a slow game based on Recruiting and Hiring, while your opponents play fast games based mostly on Shooting; by the game's rules, it is them that will dictate the length of the game. Pissing contests with your direct opponents can be fun, but do not underestimate what kind of cards they carry and what sort of combos they can create, especially in the later Eras. Your Filmmakers dictate to an extent the Projects that you will go for, to a lesser extent however your opponents do so as well; using cards and not claiming projects is suboptimal, to say the least. If you can afford the luxury, applying for the projects that your opponents don't do might be a way forward.

The good news is that one can always catch up from one Era to the next, especially if he tried to manage his hand cleverly. All his discards and hands cards are reshuffled into what is now called 'his' deck. Even near the end of the game this will not be an enormous affair, it will be however an interesting affair, depending on how you went on about it.

I enjoyed the card diversity and the options that the game provided. The different projects feel different. There is not a single path to victory, taking into account however the available Big and Small Goals is an obvious way of getting there and get more out of exactly the same actions.

Two player games feel very different to three and four player games. The major reason is the game's flow. You can easily see when an Era will end when playing against one opponent. With four players, one might tend to concentrate too much on his opponent sitting opposite him, and be caught of guard when the flow of the game does not suit his play (e.g. because he run out of cards too early). Paying attention to what others are doing might or might not work depending on your card draws. Clearly, the game favours logical exchanges; if you approach it with a hand twitching towards double Filmmaker exchanges on every single Era, things might not work so well.

I enjoyed the theme, which comes out as clever and relatively fitting to the rules at hand. It might not be perfectly tight for everything that goes on, the basic premise however of a studio with limited resources pursuing different projects is well-executed. The artwork is strong; it actually depicts real-life movies, and you will be able to guess some 90% of them, if not all.

The weak points: Luck plays an important role; very important in some cases. The fact that each Era has a limited number of turns means that a poor draw cannot be mitigated that easily. It is not an overbearing obstacle for me, but if you feel that games of this kind shoehorn you into unsustainable positions, I'd strongly recommend to try before you buy.

The game presents itself as a deck-builder. It is patently not; it is a hand-drafting and management game. There is no deck to build, unless one considers his hand as a deck, or the deck that is slowly created by his discards Era after Era. For me that would be a rather loose definition of deck-building. I am not saying that the game's system does not work; under the wrong classification however it might create wrong expectations. Buy it for what it is, not what it purports to be.

I don't claim mastery of IP law, but having all imagery depict actual existing movies, from The Mask to Godfather to Star Wars, would imply a certain adherence to IP law and huge royalties having been paid for the right to use images of this kind. I wish I am wrong, but at this price this does not appear to be the case. As much as some buyers might handwave it, I find it terribly discomforting. I seriously hope I am wrong.

The rulebook could be better written and edited; as an example, in the introduction the third option in a turn is named wrongly. It took me three readings to assimilate what was going on and understand some notions that with a different layout and some tighter writing would have been obvious from the get-go. When games ten times lighter or harder than this (Kingdomino, Quartermaster General: 1941 and Quartermaster General: Victory Or Death are just the latest examples) have all their card attributions on the rulebook or the player aids, one understand how unsupported Motion Pictures comes out as. It is information like this that helps players understand a game faster and love it more, because they can enjoy intelligent plays earlier in the learning curve. Oh, well.

I would have also appreciated the rulebook free of charge at the company's website for a buyer to see what he would be getting into. Alas, it is not to be found.

Conclusion: Motion Pictures: Movies Out Of Cardboard is a nice filler that covers a rather niche segment of the hand-management market. It might not be the absolute blockbuster; seen however as an intro to the genre, or as a respite from heavier games of this type, it is definitely an entertaining play.

For more info on Motion Pictures: Movies Out Of Cardboard and Drawlab Entertainment visit its website at http://www.drawlab.com.

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