Reels & Deals was included in the Games 100 in October 08, Games Magazine's annual round-up of the best 100 games in print (yes, we tabletop geeks take this seriously), and when I learned that the developers live scant blocks from my house, I decided I had to take a look at it.
It's a card game in which you represent a Hollywood studio, earning both money and "score" (is there a difference in a commercial medium?) by producing movies. The game ends when any player has released at least two movies, and one of them was a "feature film." (This means that play is no more than an hour in length, even with the full complement of 5 players -- the game says it's for "2-5 players," but my guess is that a two-player game isn't that much fun.)
There are two decks: a small deck of "scripts," and a larger deck of everything else, meaning directors, actors, "enhancers," and "producers" (instants). You start with $12 and 6 non-script cards; during your turn, you can take 3 actions, which include playing talent (directors and actors) from your hand in front of you; drawing and placing a script card in front of you; playing an instant on someone else; drawing new cards; or bidding on one of the talent cards in the "talent agency" at the table center. The talent agency starts with two cards, but players can also sell talent to it, generally because they're short of money but also because some talent isn't as talented as the money you can earn by doing so.
Each script card states the requirements for its production (e.g., "1 director, 1 star actor/actress, 2 actors/actresses"); you have to fulfill the requirements to "produce" it by buying the relevant talent and, in some cases, playing enhancement cards, at which point you can spend a full turn "releasing" it. When you do so, you earn the revenue and score points listed on the script card. Scripts are of three genres (action, comedy or drama), and each actor and director also earns points in each of the three dramas -- e.g., an actor might be worth a lot more in a comedy than in a drama or action flick -- and also many talent and script cards have special rules ("exceptions" in the sense of Cosmic Encounter or Magic: The Gathering) that affect the outcome.
The cards bear likenesses in a sort of stylized caricature way, and names that bear some resemblance to popular folks in the Hollywood fishbowl, which players who actually follow this crap might find amusing -- hard for me to say, since I pay no attention to the brainless peafowl of Hollywood.
What's going on from a design perspective here is somewhat interesting: Reels and Deals is clearly not motivated by the sort of systems focus of most Eurogames, but instead by the simulationist impulse I associate with "Ameritrash" games of the Avalon Hill/SPI/West End era. E.g., the notion of "attaching talent" to "scripts" is indeed what Hollywood dweebs think about. Yet the system is quite simple (I doubt the rules are longer that 1500 words), and accessible to a broad audience; Agman clearly aspires to something that might sell well at WalMart and Toys R Us, albeit reaching that sort of mass audience without a seven-figure promotional budget (or some dreary license) is fucking hard. And yet in a way, they're onto something; it's accessible, it's fun, and you could see this game doing very well if it can find some way of getting past the idiot gatekeepers of the mass market game market and into actual consumer hands.
But we, of course, do not address the mass market, and so the question for us is more whether this game is worth your time. And the answer is yes, I think, with some caveats; and to express those caveats, I'm going to give you an example.
Some years ago, I used to run game sessions on occasional Saturdays, in which I'd invite a couple of dozen people to attend. We'd begin in the early afternoon with serious strategy games like History of the World and Formula De and Puerto Rico. Later on, we'd bring out cocktails, and a larger female contingent would arrive (not that the earlier period didn't include -some- players with two X chromosomes), and we'd graduate to somewhat lighter fare, like Falling and Fluxx. And by the inebriate portion of the evening, we'd be down to Charades and Apples to Apples.
Reels & Deals is perfectly suited to that middle portion; it does not have enough depth to satisfy serious game geeks, and success is too tied to chance rather than strategy; but it's accessible and entertaining enough for non-, or sometime-gamers to enjoy. Perhaps a bit too much for after the third Cosmo, but that's not really a criticism.
