Roll Camera!: The Filmmaking Board Game

JHJHunter101star5,9

-1 Disclosure I tend to write quite critically about parts of my hobbies, and board games are not exempt from this. I mean no harm when I do so. I very rarely purchase a game that a actually despise and I would never bother spending time to write an essay / critique / review about it. If I do write something, it must be that my thoughts on the game must be high enough to go trough the trouble. The goal is not to insult but to inform and discuss. 0. Abstract Roll Camera task you and up to 3 other friends to assemble a filming crew and to solve the puzzle of making a short film. Many of the challenges real movie producers deal with are translated in terms of game mechanics. From putting up a set, filming scenes, to dealing with budget and time constraints. And it does so in a fun and thematic way. When everything fits right the game can give an amazing feeling of a race of the clock against all odds. There are some glaring issues with the game however that is rather difficult to look over. 1. Difficuly The main issue I have with the game is exactly this race against the clock mechanism. Because when it fails to work, the entire game does as well. When the randomness of the game results in an easy time, the feeling of challenge slips away and it becomes a slog knowing nothing is stopping you from achieving victory. Likewise, if the game deals you a brutal combination of dice rolls and / or cards you can start to feel that you lose all agency towards getting a good result. So to solve this, the difficulty has to be right every time for you to get that perfect amount of tension in each game. This can be done with the difficulty settings, but this just means that in between all these perfect games, you are playtesting, playing suboptimal games, while you are finding the perfect setting. The game would've been better off with just a high score mechanism. 2. Problem Cards Another big issue with the game is the lack of thought when dealing with the negative event cards called problems. You turn one over every round to reveal a new issue found in your process, solving them by assigning dice. And if left unsolved you move them making it more difficult to do so next round. In theory, this works great. They cause a random disturbance in your plan of making the film and thus force the players to adapt and use their problem-solving skills to go around it. In practice, this problem-solving is called two dice. For nearly all of the problem cards, your best option is to just use any two dice to get rid of the problem immediately. And almost always you want to do it immediately as the longer the problems stay, the more difficult it becomes to solve them. There is pretty much no thought behind it as keeping them usually is not a feasible option. From a gameplay perspective, the game just falls apart on this level. There is no need for cooperation since cooperation is not needed. Just clear a problem and move a little step forward every round. C. Conclusion Roll Camera really is a work of art in some ways. It really does give an amazing feeling when everything is right. But tactics wise it just doesn't feel rewarding enough. And when difficulty sliders become an issue as well, the game just doesn't deliver enough to deal with these issues. S. Solutions

MoMohaszstar7,5

Only played it twice, bought it mainly because of the theme / art, but I do like the mechanics as well. I need to play it more to know if it's worth keeping.