MovieHolic

MovieHolic from Homosapiens Lab is a trivia-style game for movie buffs designed by Sonic (aka Hangzai), with appropriately evocative art by Pete Wang. It notionally takes 3-8 players but there's no real upper limit on the number of players; with eight or more we'd just divide players into teams.

The cards for the game represent themes, settings, subject matter or genres. The rules offer different options for playing but all involve laying out three cards at random with players trying to come up with a movie that satisfies all the criteria set by the cards. Since the cards can sometimes come up with seemingly contradictory settings, it can be surprisingly difficult to come up with movie titles that satisfy all three cards, even for dedicated film buffs.

Expect arguments. During our plays at Board's Eye View the cards Road Movie, Time Travel and School came up. One player immediately offered Back To The Future - a good match for Time Travel and School but a stretch for Road Movie, especially when everyone else chorused 'Where we're going, we don't need roads'!

Arguing over the answers only adds to the experience of the game. The only thing we found that detracts from it is the included 60-second sandtimer. If you play with the timer, the players should have just 60 seconds to come up with a movie title. The player who succeeds gets 2 points and then flips the timer, giving a chance for another player to come up with a second film that meets the criteria - and obviously the faster the first film is named, the less sand there is in the flipped sandtimer for players to come up with a second title. We had no problem with the time allocation or the mechanic for limiting the second guess. What became tedious was waiting for the timer to reset when we were all ready for the next turn.

Once notable strength of MovieHolic is that it readily functions as a toolkit for players to come up with their own homegrown variants. For example, we devised our own two-player game where one player chooses cards rather than drawing them at random and the other player has the challenge of coming up with a movie. You could play this as a cooperative game, scoring more points for the more cards used in a clue. Another variant you can try is placing out a row of six cards and then have players bid for the number of cards they can incorporate in the movie they name.

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