Popcorn is a game all about being the boss of your very own movie theater. Your job is to get the rights to show different films, bring in movie fans, and make your theater halls better so people have a wonderful time watching. You need to make sure you always have new movies playing. That means taking off movies that nobody is coming to see anymore and putting up fresh ones to get folks excited and through the doors. While you’re trying to earn points, which are called ‘popcorn’ in this game, you also have to be smart with your money. You’ll need cash to buy those movie rights and to improve your theater rooms.
You start with three movie rooms in your theater, and each one will show a different film. These rooms can hold anywhere from one to three moviegoers. Some of the seats in these rooms have special powers. You only get to use these special powers if the person you put in that seat matches the seat’s color. Seats that are gray are like wildcards; as long as you have someone sitting there, you get the benefit. In the third room shown above, the seat is blue, so you need to have a blue-colored customer in it to earn that extra bit of money.
You handle your customers using a method called ‘deck-building,’ but in Popcorn, it’s done by building a bag of tokens. Depending on how many people you’ve attracted, you’ll pull a certain number of customer tokens from your bag each round. Then, you try to place these customers into your theater rooms. The customers you successfully seat will give you advantages, not just from the seats they’re in, but also from what the movie offers. When your bag of tokens is empty, you put the customers you’ve already used back into the bag and start drawing again. During the game, you can pick up customer tokens of certain colors from a shared pile or even from other players. You can also take your own customer tokens out of play and put them back into the shared pile. The kind of movies you’re showing and the types of seats you have will make you want certain customer colors more than others. In this game, colors stand for different types of movies, like comedies, action films, or dramas.
Movies don’t stay popular forever. Each movie has four sections on its left side, showing four different benefits you can get. The customers you have on the right can help you unlock these benefits. At the end of each round, the bottom section of these benefits gets covered up and can’t be used anymore. Once all four sections are covered, the movie is considered old news, and you can’t show it anymore. Of course, you don’t have to wait until the very end to switch to a new movie; you can do it sooner if you want.
What you can do in the game is pretty straightforward. You can buy movies from a shared selection. You can also buy new theater rooms. If you did some advertising in the round before, you can bring in specific types of customers to your theater. After everyone has taken their turns, you then move on to showing your movies and earning points and other good things from them.
One way to get points is by completing objective cards. These are the cards you see on the right side in the picture above. You start the game with one of these cards, and you can get more as you play. Objective cards tell you what you need to have done by the end of the game to score points. They might ask you to have a certain mix of customers, movies, and seats of a specific color. You get to keep all the movies you’ve shown during the game. However, if you replace a theater room with a new one, you don’t get to keep the old room or its seats. The group of customers you have can change as the game goes on. You can add more customers or take some away. Other players might even take your customers.
I had more fun playing Popcorn than I thought I would. I hadn’t heard of this game before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Playing the practice round on BoardGameArena.com didn’t seem like much at first. But the theme of running a movie theater really comes through, and I found myself enjoying it. The movie parodies are pretty funny. I have to stay sharp and be ready to buy the next movie before the one I’m showing now stops bringing people in. Even a big hit like Titanic will eventually run out of viewers. You also need to pay attention to what other players are doing. If you’re both going for the same type of movie or customer, it’s probably going to be tough for both of you. You’ll end up fighting over the same customers, movies, and theater seats. I found some of the goals to be quite hard to reach, especially the ones that require you to have only a few white customers. I think it might be best to focus on one type of movie genre from the start to be able to complete those kinds of goals.
Some parts of the game are about making quick decisions. When you see a good chance, you should grab that movie or that theater room. There are some easy wins you shouldn’t miss. It’s about looking at what’s happening right now and spotting patterns. Still, you should have a plan for the long run, like focusing on certain movie types and working towards your goals. The four movie types in the game have different effects. Action movies help you get points fast. Comedies let you bring in more people. Dramas help you with money and getting objective cards. When you think about it this way, it does sound a bit like a deck-building game.
At the end of the game, it feels good to look back at all the movies you’ve shown at your theater. I had films like Top Gun, Fast & Furious, and The Godfather playing! And I think Pretty Woman was on the list too.
Popcorn is a game that’s not too simple but not overly complicated either. It’s a good choice for a family game night. You get to enjoy all the fun parts of running a movie theater without having to deal with the messy stuff, like cleaning up spilled popcorn off the floor late at night.
