Card game about making movies?

[Disthron]

Hi everyone.

I was watching this board game review show on youtube that I'm
subscribed. You can see the particular video here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_e0_zvOXss

In the video they review a game that is supposed to be about making a
movie but one of the criticisms is that the theme could have been
changed to anything and the game would be pretty much unaffected. It
was really just window dressing and had nothing to do with the game
play.

It got me to thinking, how would you go about making a board game
about making movies and have the mechanics actually be somewhat
relevant? I only just watched the video a couple of hours ago but I'm
already starting to come up with some ideas. Like you would use
finances to build sets and hire actors and use the actors and sets to
shoot scenes for your movie and you could also play event cards to to
ether benefit yourself or hinder the other "directors".

What do you fine people think?

[Peter Blake]

You should definitely check out the 1970s game "Moviemaker" which works along the lines you describe. There's a link to some pics at http://www.vintagetoysgames.co.uk/moviemaker_board_game.html

I can remember most of the mechanics, so briefly here's how it worked:

Players roll d6 in turn to move their token around the board, collecting locations or drawing from a deck of stories, directors and stars. A movie is made from a story card, however many locations the story card requires, a director, a male star and a female star. Each time a player's token passes the box office, they get 10% of their movie's value as box office takings (shades of Monopoly).

A movie's value is calculated from values given on the story card (depends on genre of story, ranges from horror/1 location to epic/4 locations), director card (depends on quality of director, levels 1-4), and star cards (value depends on genre of story). You could also win silver statuettes for your movie, which added a fixed amount to their value.

The most disastrous space on the board to land on was "Box office flop: lose your last movie", so very often you'd make a fantastic movie followed quickly by a shocker to cover your tail.

We used to play for a fixed time and then count up the values of our cash and movies, with the wealthiest player being the winner.

Caveat: the rules sheet had been lost from the copy of the game I played, so all of this was taught to me by other players.

If you want to know more, drop me an email.

Yours,
Peter

Peter Blake 
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[Disthron]

-[Edit]-
I did a reply to the auther... dose that man I PM'ed the previous
response? Anyway, here is what I posted.

Thanks for the information, it looks like an interesting game.

I was thinking of having different classes of movies (like they had in
Movie Maker), but rather than just having one card with the costs
listed you would make a set of cards. Fore instance a short movie
would have an intro scene card, a delema scene card and a resolution
scene card. More advanced movies would have multipuls of each of those
cards. As long as you have at least 1 of each you have a finished
movie. However, that was more of a way to justify my initial idea for
having multiple cards. I thought it would be cool if the players could
actually construct a story using the scenes described on the cards. So
part of the skill would be arranging the cards you drew into a story
that is cool and makes seance. I was even considering having giving a
players describe there movies and give rewards to those they think had
the best. Although I realize that could easaly devolve into everyone
saying everyone else's movie is crap.

However, being from a computer programming background and being a
noobie when it comes to board games I'm not sure how you would go
about implementing that. Are there other games that have modular
stories? I mean the mechanics of getting a number of scene cards would
work but I'm not sure how I'd write the story segments. Any ideas?

On Jul 5, 9:39 am, Peter Blake <Peter.Bl...@acu.edu.au> wrote:
> You should definitely check out the 1970s game "Moviemaker" which works along the lines you describe. There's a link to some pics athttp://www.vintagetoysgames.co.uk/moviemaker_board_game.html

[Timothy Ferguson]

Disthron [dist...@gmail.com]

Are there other games that have modular
stories? I mean the mechanics of getting a number of scene cards would
work but I'm not sure how I'd write the story segments. Any ideas?

Well, there's "Once Upon A Time"? It's not so much a story segment as a
motif that the player weaves in.

[Peter Blake]

You could quite easily divide the resolutions into categories (e.g. violence, trickery, negotiation, assistance) and write the dilemma story segments such that any resolution from a certain category or categories would work to resolve it. Following that train of thought, you could have symbols on the card edges which players need to match up, with extra points available for an entertaining narrative.

Yours,
Peter

[Disthron]

That's an grate idea Peter. I'm going to keep working on this. But
even if I can't get any flavour text I'm happy with the mechanic still
seems good. At least at this early stage anyway.

[Disthron]

Thanks for the suggestion Peter. I think that could work. I'm going to
keep working on this, even if I can't get the story thing to work out
I still think the mechanic can work. Also, is anyone else having
trouble with there posts showing up?