What is it about?
Get the popcorn at the ready, this game review is about to begin. Ever wondered what it's like to own your own cinema? Well, with Popcorn you can. Popcorn is played with the luck of the draw, known as bag building, meaning that each turn could help or hinder your play.
The aim is to score the most points from putting on the best films, seating the right guests, and providing the right experience. Whilst using advertising to boost sales.
Pre production (Set up)
What is it about?
Get the popcorn at the ready, this game review is about to begin. Ever wondered what it's like to own your own cinema? Well, with Popcorn you can. Popcorn is played with the luck of the draw, known as bag building, meaning that each turn could help or hinder your play.
The aim is to score the most points from putting on the best films, seating the right guests, and providing the right experience. Whilst using advertising to boost sales.
Pre production (Set up)
Choose your coloured cinema board and matching popcorn container, each player chooses one starting movie. The other cards are shuffled and three are dealt out for the features and premiere area of the shared space.
Each player is dealt two award cards, and chooses to keep one of them, these are used to boost scoring points at the end of the game. Advertising helps boost footfall in the cinema and each player receives three advertising tokens to use during game play.
In the centre of the playing space deal the screen (theatre) cards into three stacks, indicated by the number of silhouettes on the back of each card. Deal three from each pile into the shared area these are your available screens. Put two of each colour guest pieces in the shared area, leaving the white guests out initially. Set aside a pool of popcorn and coins.
3, 2, 1 Action
Like other tycoon style games, Popcorn is played over 9 rounds, each round has 3 phases.
1. Buying and Advertising
Time to be the marketing magnate using three action opportunities; buy a movie, buy a screening room or advertise to get the right cinema goers through the door.
Movies and screens are bought from the shared marketplace, these are optional actions that can only take place once during each turn. Once a movie has been bought, you can either add it to your empty screen or replace it with a movie already being shown. Each movie has a number of bonuses that can be activated. When a new screen is purchased you can use it as a new screen or replace an existing one in this case the existing screen is placed at the bottom of the corresponding screen pile.
Advertising is crucial to the game as it is in the real world, some movie actions offer the opportunity to place one of the three advertising tokens on the advertising board. At this point in the game play you can either leave the token, remove it +/- play the associated guest action:
● Take a corresponding guest token and add it to the bag
● Choose any coloured guest token and add it to the bag
● Place 1 white token from the reserve or exit space and add it to ANY players bag
2. Showings
This simultaneous phase occurs once all players have completed buying and advertising (Phase 1). The effects of phase 1 actions have a direct impact on phase 2 so strategic planning is required to increase productivity and cinema popularity.
Open the doors and let the guests in, the audience track at the bottom of each player's cinema board indicates the capacity of your cinema. From the bag draw the corresponding number of guests.
Guests are then seated in the screening rooms, ensuring maximum output from each guest. Guests can only be seated in screens with movies showing, and seats have to be filled in order so empty gaps cannot be left. Guests can sit on any coloured seat and in any colour of screen, however placing guests of equal colour to the seat, screen and movie gives better rewards in the following passage of game play.
Seat and movie actions are carried out where applicable at this stage. Grey seats provide rewards to any guest. Coloured seat and movie actions are only applicable to the guest of the same colour when seated in/watching them.
Seat/Movie actions include:
● Gaining money
● Gaining popcorn
● Moving a guest from the exit to the bag or reserve
● Use an unused movie action from the corresponding screen
● Move the audience cube up one
● Draw 2 Aware cards, keeping 1
● Place 1 advertising token on the advertising board
Once a guest has been activated and all applicable rewards carried out the guest moves to the exit zone.
Scoring
As the doors close on the cinema for the final showing, the cashing up begins.
Count the Popcorn in the bucket
Gain 1 for every 5
Count the total cost of each screen. The player with the highest cost gains the 5 popcorn and the second player gains the 3 popcorn (if playing 2 player game the first player gains the 3 popcorn )
Reveal any award cards and gain the corresponding popcorn
The winner is the player with the most
Critics review
If you love strategic tycoon style games like Camping Season, Pergola, Viticulture then you will enjoy Popcorn. It has minimal player interaction, which is fine if you don’t mind how you win. If you want to sabotage other players games to win then Popcorn isn’t the game for you.
