Day 8 - Roll Camera - Xmas Movie

Roll Camera has always been a little darling of mine. While I see it's flaws I still enjoy it for what it brings to the table and the joy we get in making our own weird movies.

In Roll Camera you take on the roles of the production crew putting together a movie. On your turn you roll 6 dice which become your workers. They can be used to perform actions on your own player board or on the main board. Actions such as building set or solving problems, or shooting a scene. Over the course of the game you must shoot 5 scenes before you run out of time or money. Then at the end of of the game the quality of your movie must be either "Not Bad" or higher or... "So bad it's good".

For our seasonal play of Roll Camera I added two expansions. The B-Movie expansion which I will never not play with. This gives you a new win/loss condition, Genres, to worry about and makes the Script more important to overall victory. And the Xmas Movie Story Pack. The Story packs are a line of mini themed expansions that Keen Bean have been putting out for the last few years.

The Xmas movie pack comes with 18 new scenes to shoot, 4 new script pages, 3 new ideas and 3 new problems, all of which can be used without the rest of the pack to give your game a more festive flair. However the main module is about crew Morale.

As it's the holiday season the Crew wants to go home and see their families, not shoot your movie, so morale is very fragile. Each turn morale goes down after you draw a problem card, by the number of problems in the queue. When morale gets low the VFX face of the dice can no longer be used as a wild and if it gets all the way to the bottom of the morale track then every scene you shoot costs an additional $.

Morale can be raised though through gift giving. Each player starts with a gift and can use any die on their turn to claim more gifts from the deck. Each gift raises morale by upto 4, as well as giving an additional bonus. Of course while you're going out collecting gifts, you're not working on your movie!

Overall the morale track gives you one more thing to try and balance, which with B-Movie thrown in as well, makes for a pretty crunchy experience overall. And we did finish shooting "The Midnight Before Money Grabbing Off-Key Carols", unfortunately despite that snappy title, the movie was Boring and Forgettable.