Popcorn

• Designer: Victor Saumont
• Publisher: iello
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://link.amazon/B0bIHul4z
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

In Popcorn, each player manages their own movie theater and tries to show the best combination of movies in order to attract guests to their seats. The game plays out over nine rounds, and in each round you may acquire a new movie, build or upgrade your theater, and use advertising to attract new guests — then it’s showtime, with you drawing guests at random from your bag to see who has shown up. Place guests in the right seats to activate special powers; match them with the right movies, and you get a movie bonus as well, thanks to their enthusiasm for your good taste.

After watching films in your theater, guests might be spirited away to other theaters thanks to ads presented by those theater owners – but you’ll probably do the same to them, too. The bonuses from a movie get worse the longer it runs, so be sure to bring in fresh films to keep guests on the edge of your seats. After all, happy guests can help your theater win awards in town; more importantly, they can keep the “popcorn” piling up in your coffers, and whichever theater owner fills their popcorn box the best wins.

To set up, make a display of the movie cards and the Theatre tiles.  The Award cards are also shuffled and placed on the table.  Each player gets a Cinema board and a starting movie card which is slid into the left most slot.  One guest of each color is placed in the exit area of the board.  The player’s bag is filled with 10 guests  to start: 1 of each non-white color, 5 white, and one matching the color of the starting movie.   Players get starting money (amount dependent on starting player order) as well as 2 Award cards, one of which is kept and one of which is placed under the deck. 

The game is played in a number of rounds, each with three Phases: Buying/Advertising, Showings, End of Round.

In the Buying and Advertising Phase, there are a number of actions you can take in any order.

• Buy a movie – once a turn, buy a movie from the supply, paying the cost on the tile plus any extra cost if it is from the Premier row of the supply. This movie must then be immediately placed in your cinema, either in an empty theatre or replacing a movie that is currently showing.  If you meet the bonus requirements, gain that bonus immediately when placing it in a theatre.
• Buy a theatre – once per turn, and not in the first turn, you may buy a theatre tile and then place it on your Cinema board.
• Activate Advertising tokens – you can use previously placed tokens to add guests of certain colors to your bag or to add white guests to another player’s bag

In the Showings Phase, all players play simultaneously.

• Open the cinema – draw as many guests from your bag as indicated by the audience track at the bottom of your Cinema board.  If the bag is empty, refill from your Exit zone.
• Place Guests – place the drawn guests into theatres that are showing a movie, in seat number order.  It’s generally beneficial to place guests onto seats that match their color or with movies that match their color
• Seat and Movie Actions – you must now go activate Theaters (in the order of your choosing), going from lowest seat number Guest to highest.  Taking a Seat action if possible (for all gray seats and for all matching colored guest/seat pairs) and then a Movie action if the color of the movie matches the Guest color.  Movie actions are seen to the left of the movie.  After each Guest has been activated, it is placed in the Exit area of your Cinema.

To end each round, players must move their Lobby Sliders up one space on each movie showing in their theatres – that is, reduce the number of possible actions by one.  The display is refreshed and another round starts – unless the Final Showing tile has been revealed, at which point the game has a final round and then ends.

Scoring:

• Popcorn earned in the course of the game
• Money – 1 VP per every $5 left over
• Theater Trophies – 5/3 VP to the most/2nd highest total cost of theater tiles
• Award Cards – score points if you meet the criteria

The player with the most points wins. There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

Interestingly, I’m not much of a movie person in real life, so this theme isn’t a natural attractant. However, many of the people I game with love movies, so this one was a natural to hit our table.  The game itself is a puzzle of sorts, with players trying to maximize the actions they can take each turn – this being a combination of the guests in their bag and the movies in their theatres (and further determined by the age of the movie which determines how many actions are available).

Player order is fairly important here as the best selection of movies and theater tiles comes to those who take their turn first that round.  Sure, turn order rotates each round, so it should even out… but it does suck if the tiles don’t match your strategy on the turn you get to go first.  I will say that in most of the games that I’ve played, luck of the draw has played a fairly large role in determining the winner.

I did like the challenge of getting the right meeples into the right seats and watching the right movies.  Getting the timing right is also a nice plus.  As you lose the bottom most action from each movie each round, you have to be able to get the right Guests into those movies to get the maximum benefit.

Though again it should even out, there is a take-that mechanic used here to move around the woefully small supply of colored meeples – I really don’t like that the game lets you take from any player.  It could have been untargeted – simply take from the player to your left and keep going clockwise to find the color of your choosing.  Allowing players to choose means that there is always the chance that the leader (or suspected leader) gets ganged up on, and that one player loses all their meeples to the other player.  While this could certainly be needed for balancing – this is one of my least favorite ways to do it.  

Again, nothing particularly wrong with this type of action, it’s just not one that I personally prefer. If the game wants to be a bag-builder, then let me build my bag without the other players stealing all my meeples!  Further, the game doesn’t feel like it’s long enough to really give you enough rounds to build a bag and cycle through it enough times to see the benefit.  

Game length, time wise is OK for the complexity of the game, but I don’t think I’d want it to go much longer.  Yes, I know that I just complained that the game isn’t long enough to really feel like I’m usefully building my bag. But, making the game longer by adding more rounds isn’t the solution either.

The components are well done, and I have enjoyed reading all the movie stuff and looking for the jokes and references on them.   The little popcorn buckets for holding your VPs are nice too.  I will note that I don’t understand why the currency of the game is Popcorn and not Money.  If I owned a theater, I’m not trying to collect popcorn, I’m trying to sell it to my victims for even more money!

If you like movies and puzzle games, this is one to check out.  You have to be willing to accept a fair amount of card luck as well as a take-that aspect to the Guests.  For me, this is one probably to stream at home rather than see in the theatre.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Steph
• Neutral. Dale, Mark Jackson
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://link.amazon/B0bIHul4z