Popcorn

Popcorn is a game about running your own cineplex. You buy screening rights for movies, you attract cinema-goers and you upgrade your cinema halls to provide great movie experiences. You have to keep your list of movies fresh, taking down movies before customers completely dry up and showing new movies to attract customers. While scoring points (points are called popcorn here), you need to take care of your cashflow because you need money to buy new movies and upgrade your theatres. 

You have three halls at your cinema and they will show different movies. Cinema halls can fit between one to three customers. Some seats have special abilities. You enjoy these benefits only if the customer you arrange to sit there match the seat colour. Grey seats are wild, so as long as you have a customer, you get the benefit. In the third hall above, the seat is blue, so you need a blue customer there to be able to earn that extra money. 

Customers are handled using a deck-building mechanism. In Popcorn this is physically implemented as bag-building. Depending on your audience level, you draw a number of customers from the bag every round, and you try to seat them in your halls. Customers you manage to seat will give you benefits not only based on the seats, but also based on the options offered by the movie. When your bag runs out of customers, you return used customers to your bag and continue drawing. During the game you can take customers of specific colours from the common supply or from other players, and you can also remove your own customers from circulation, returning them to the common supply. Depending on the kind of movies you have and the types of seats you have, you will prefer customers of specific colours. In this game colours mean movie genres, like comedy, action, drama. 

Movies have a limited lifetime. There are four segments on the left side of a movie, showing four different benefits. The right customers can help you claim these. At the end of every round, the bottommost visible segment will be covered and becomes unavailable. When all four segments are covered, the movie expires and you can no longer show it. Of course you don't necessarily have to wait until then to replace it with a new movie. You can do so earlier. 

Your actions are pretty simple. You buy movies from a common pool. You buy halls. If you have invested in marketing in the previous round, you can attract specific customers to your pool of customers. After everyone has performed actions, you move on to screening movies and scoring points and other benefits from doing so. 

One of the ways to score points is through the objective cards (those on the right in the screenshot above). You start the game with one, and during the game you can draw more. Objective cards specify conditions you need to fulfil by game end in order to score points. They can be in the form of sets of customer + movie + seat of a specific colour. You keep all movies you have shown throughout the game. However when you replace a hall with a new one, you don't keep the old hall or the seats in it. Your pool of customers can change during the game. You can add or remove customers. Others may steal your customers too. 

Popcorn was much more fun than I expected. I had not heard of the game before, and I didn't really know what to expect. It didn't seem like much from playing the tutorial on BoardGameArena.com. However the movie theatre theme really does kick in and I found myself enjoying the game. The movie spoofs are funny. I have to be on my toes preparing to buy the next movie before a currently showing movie runs dry. Even Titanic will eventually run out of viewers. You have to watch your opponents. If you are going for the same colour as another player, it will likely be painful for both of you. You'll be fighting over the same customers, movies and halls (seats). I find some of the objectives rather hard to achieve, especially those that require that I have few white customers. I think I need to specialise in a certain genre from early on to be able to achieve such an objective. 

Some parts of the game are tactical. When an opportunity arises, you grab that movie or that hall. There are some quick wins you shouldn't miss. This is about analysing the current situation and recognising patterns. You should still have a longer-term strategy, specialising in some genres, and working towards some of your objectives. The four genres in the game have different characteristics. Action movies get you points quickly. Comedies let you increase your audience. Dramas help you with money and objective cards. Looking at it this way, this sounds like a deck-building game. 

At the end of the game, it is satisfying to review all those movies I have screened at my cineplex. I have Top Gun, Fast & Furious and The Godfather! And I think that's Pretty Woman. 

Popcorn is a light- to mid-weight strategy game. It will work as a family game. You get to enjoy the fun bits of running a cineplex without worrying about the downsides, like cleaning up all that popcorn on the floor at 2am.