Roll Camera has always been a personal favorite of mine. Even though I can see its small imperfections, I still enjoy it greatly for the fun it brings to the table. There is a special joy in creating our own strange and unusual movies together.
In this game, you step into the shoes of a production crew trying to finish a movie. On your turn, you roll six dice, and these dice act as your workers. You can use them to perform actions on your own player board or on the main board. These actions include building sets, solving problems, or shooting scenes. Throughout the game, you must shoot five scenes before you run out of time or money. At the end of the game, the quality of your movie needs to be either “Not Bad” or higher, or so bad that it is actually good.
For our special holiday game session, I added two expansions to the mix. First, I used the B-Movie expansion, which I never play without. This adds a new win or loss condition involving genres, making the script much more important for overall victory. Second, I added the Xmas Movie Story Pack. Story packs are a series of mini-themed expansions that Keen Bean has been releasing over the last few years.
The Xmas movie pack includes 18 new scenes to shoot, four new script pages, three new ideas, and three new problems. You can use these components without the rest of the pack to give your game a more festive feeling. However, the main feature of this module is the crew Morale system.
Since it is the holiday season, the crew wants to go home to see their families rather than shoot your movie. This makes morale very fragile. Each turn, morale goes down after you draw a problem card. The amount it drops depends on the number of problems currently in the queue. When morale gets low, the VFX face of the dice can no longer be used as a wild card. If morale drops all the way to the bottom of the track, every scene you shoot costs an additional dollar.
Morale can be raised through gift giving. Each player starts with one gift and can use any die on their turn to claim more gifts from the deck. Each gift raises morale by up to four points, and it also gives an additional bonus. Of course, while you are out collecting gifts, you are not working on your movie, which creates a difficult balance.
Overall, the morale track gives you one more thing to try and balance. When combined with the B-Movie expansion, it makes for a pretty crunchy experience. We did finish shooting “The Midnight Before Money Grabbing Off-Key Carols.” Unfortunately, despite that snappy title, the movie we made was boring and forgettable.
The added pressure of keeping the crew happy while managing resources and time really changes the dynamic of the game. It forces you to make tough decisions about whether to focus on production or to stop and boost morale. This makes the gameplay feel more intense and strategic, especially during a busy holiday season setting.
