B Movie Card Game- want some feedback

[Prak]

In the course of promoting my kickstarter on Facebook, the woman who manages a local B Movie film fest thing shared my post and I mentioned I could do an expansion based on the film fest if I got some collaboration from people who were more involved with it. This then turned into the idea to do a distinct game about B Movies.

The basic idea I came up with is players create movie titles from cards, then decide which movie sounds best in a round.

The game play would be-

The Pitch- Players make a title from cards in their hand, like [Vampire] of [Bikini] [Beach] and [Wolfthings] of [Monster] [Island], and each player can give a short premise ("It's like Dusk Til Dawn, but in Spring Break!" and "Imagine Godzilla bitten by a werewolf!")

The Investment- Players have a number of Investment tokens equal to the number of players. They divvy these up between all the movies in any way they want. So lets say there are five players. Vampires of Bikini Beach's player invests three tokens into their own movie, one into Wolfthings and one into a third movie, Wolfthing thinks their movie is so awesome it has to win, so they invest all in in their own, and a third player spreads their investments evenly.

The Development- gets to play a Cast card and a Plot Twist card, like "Hey guys! I got a porn star for my lead!" and "The monsters were really aliens"

The Box Office- Each player decides secretly how many tickets they'll buy to each movie, with a limit to how many they can buy for their own (I was thinking 1, but now that I'm thinking again, maybe none). Once everyone's decided on how many tickets they'll buy for each movie, they reveal. The movie that got the most tickets wins the round.

The Return- The winning movie gets a set number of points, which is then divvied up according to the investments. The person who made the movie gets a share, the person who invested most gets two shares, and then everyone else who invested gets one share.

Then the cards are discard and the process starts again.

---

What do people think of that, and how can I make it better and simpler and tighter?

[momothefiddler]

I don't like division in my games (says the former math teacher) and this one scales pretty rapidly. You only need five players to potentially have to divide your points by seven, which I would consider criminal (halves or thirds are bad but excusable, sevenths are not). Would it mess with your premise too much if it was an amount of points people each got (with the primary investor getting double - doubling is fine), rather than an amount the movie got total?

---

I like the idea? Like I'd play the game based on this pitch but the conceptual critique isn't my thing which is why I primarily talk about math.

[pragma]

I played a game very similar to this proposal once (a decade ago) that was about pitching products. Unfortunately, I can't find the name with Google -- it's not Pitch It! or Life's a Pitch . Momo's scoring method was exactly what was used.

It leads to this really weird state where you want to have the best pitch, but only by a little bit. If you do too good a job then everyone invests in you and your lead is smaller.

[Josh_Kablack]

Here's what this reminds me of, and while that one is hilarious fun, your proposed rules have all the problems that game had plus added complexity for the sake of complexity.

Problems with James' Earnest's version:

• Unplayable hands exist. Not merely suboptimal, but you could have hands that did not have the card you needed to fill in the Mad-libs style naming, and when that happened you had to forgo starting a project - which in a game with no comeback mechanism made winning hopeless. If you add Cast and Plot Twist cards into the general deck, the odds of not having the needed Mad Libs parts of speech in your hand go way up.
• Enjoyability of replays drops severely after the 3-4 plays when most of the funniest Mad Libs combos have been seen. This was somewhat mitigated when the "semi-deluxe" edition linked above added more cards. This sort of thing needs a large card pool to stand up to repeated plays, and if you are also adding Cast and Plot Twist cards as individual decks, that pushes your printing costs too high for this to retail at a sane price point.
• Winning strategies always involved investing as much as possible in your own project. This is shallow game play and makes things less interactive. The band-aid patch is to disallow investment in your own projects, but that's hard to track in play, but a fundamental redesign is needed.

So there's the quick and easy way, where this is a slight Call and Response variant. You take turns being The Producer who reads out a title with a blank or two ( " ____ : The Revenge. This time it's about:_____" ) in it and then Apples to Apples style everyone plays a couple of face down cards to fill in the mad libs, (Dracula, Crop Circles) and then you randomly flip over a card from the Cast / Plot twist deck (Directed by Tarentino, or Animated in Claymation or something), and then you have the producer pick the winner and whenever you want to end you tally points. That's just like CaH with one additional random factor for added hilarity and lawsuit protection, so it's really easy to write and you already have production channels

Then there are several more creative ways. If you want to stick to the multi-phase investment thing. My impulse would be to try and write it as a form of team game where each round you have two teams of players where each player has a production role like "Producer", "Director", "Central Casting", "Marketing", (each of whom has various different things they can do to help the project along or skim off the top) and you are making competing films. Then the films generate both box office dollars (Split between the makers of the winning team) and Awards / critical acclaim (which goes to individual players). Then each round the teams would shift, with the players who had more Awards / Acclaim getting first dibs on which production role to take or which cards to draft or which players to pick as team partners. The game would go on for N rounds, and whoever had the most $$$ at the end of N rounds would win. Thus in the final rounds, you would likely have players actively trying to sabotage the project of the player furthest in the lead.

[Prak]

Yeah, the division thing was the thing I was most worried about. The "1 automatic, 2 for most, 1 for everyone else who invested" was the simplified form of "divide tickets by investments." Might change that to just a set number of points like Momo suggested. That seems a bit more elegant than dividing votes by investment, especially since it gives the feeling of attracting an audience. Might want some randomization factor though, which can be easily done by just adding numbers 1-10 to the cards. I lie, the randomization effect should be a deck of cards that everyone draws from before the Box Office phase with things like Picketing Church Group: -1 point as people can't get in, and Porn Star Lead: +3 points as people flock for titty

Last night (by which I mean 2am this morning) I brainstormed 625 title cards. 125 each in the categories of Beings (people and creatures), Places, Adjectives, Things and Verbs, and then prepositions are free so long as you don't abuse the fact that "From" and "Beyond" are both prepositions. That should give people plenty of cards to arrange into titles, being more than the entire first set of CAH. I'll probably whittle it down some since that will also give me expansion cards.

I want the development phase, so I want to keep something like the idea of the Cast and Plot Twist cards to give players an extra widget for their movies, but I'm not entirely decided on what it should be.

And then, yeah, an Events deck that everyone pulls from right before the Box Office phase that modifies the points.

If someone's in a position where they can't make a good title, then they can still invest, so while it's a little less fun, they can still win points by supporting another player's movie.

[TarkisFlux]

Haven't read the mechanics, I stopped when it was clear that you aren't doing anything with the B Movie Cardgame series I was expecting. You should probably find a different name if you want to avoid confusion among prospective customers, and possible legal nonsense.

[Prak]

Well, B Movie Card Game is really just a placeholder at the moment. I wasn't aware of an existing card game with that name. I'm considering something along the lines of Trash Film Festival

(Trash Film Orgy is a local B Movie weekly festival in the summers here)