Four of us this week and, first off, we tried Splotter’s latest game about film-making that was released at Essen last year. The idea behind the game is to use your limited resources in the best way to acquire the necessary components for a blockbuster film and to launch completed films at Cannes film festival. There are three types of film: sci-fi, action and ‘girlie’ films and each requires a different mix of actors, special effects and scripts. In turn, in able to acquire your actors, effects and scripts, you need to accumulate a combination of other elements. How you acquire all these thing is the crux of the game, as you need to construct a network linking the locations from which you can acquire the combination of elements to progress your film production. Once you have the necessary bits, and can complete a film, you can then launch it at Cannes and receive a revenue for it. The person accumulating the most revenue by the end of the game wins.

Our game took a little while for us all to get a handle on what we were doing. Unfortunately, scripts were non-existent until late in the game, while we all took lots of advantage of the ‘old boy network’ to further our cause. Consequently, the game finished a bit too quickly, with Nige able to launch his first and the only completed film at Cannes and end the game by laying the last old boy marker. The remainder of us were all primed to launch films on our next turn, but it was too late. This made the game slightly disappointing and I’m not sure with repeated playings whether many more than one or two films could ever be completed – certainly not with 4 players. The mechanics seemed sound enough but it didn’t excite any of us that much.