Now this is a board game theme I can get behind. Why haven’t I seen this before?
Everyone loves a trip to the cinema. Even the most miserable soul must get a kick out of the movies. They make up some of my best memories. I remember being seven years old and joining in as the entire audience sang the theme tune as Ghostbusters started. Back To The Future changed my life. The Batman in IMAX was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard (and my ears may not have recovered). On the other side of it, there’s the time myself and some evil mates (their idea, not mine) came out of The Last Action Hero (poor) and sneaked across the foyer into a free lucky dip movie: Home Alone 2 (bloody awful, and serves us right). It was always a dream job as a kid, work in a cinema, see all the films as often as you like. Well, let’s test how well you could manage your local Odeon (other cinema chains are available)…
In Popcorn, for two to four players, each player manages their own movie cinema 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 cinema, 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. (Not sure how the movie goers would cope with my taste – no Avatar in my cinema, thank you very much.)
After watching films in your cinema, guests might be spirited away to other cinemas thanks to ads presented by those cinema 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 cinema win awards in town; more importantly, they can keep the “popcorn” piling up in your coffers, and whichever cinema owner fills their popcorn box the best wins.
So there you have it, a chance for you to prove that you can make better business decisions than your local Cineworld (other cinema chains are available). Me? I’ll have The Thing on Screen 1, always, all three Lord of the Rings films (extended versions) in a loop on Screen 2 (it’s fine, we don’t need The Hobbit, ta), a lucky dip of Conjuring Universe movies on Screen 3, and Interstellar on Screen 4 just to irritate this one person who believes it’s the worst movie ever made (it’s not: that award goes to 28 Years Later). Head over to this page to have a closer look – and take note that it’s a bit of a bargain…
About the author:
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.
