New Years Eve Games

We hadn't planned to do anything this past NYE, but in the morning we got an invite from our friends to come over in the evening for food and games. So we did.

After a very nice meal we settled down to the important part of the evening - playing games until midnight. We started off with 'Hollywood 1947', a kickstarter project I backed earlier in the year and which I got back in October. I've played it two-player and three-player, but it is essentially a hidden role game and as such works best with 5 or more players (it takes up to 9).

It's set, as the title suggests, in Hollywood in 1947, and revolves around producing films during the Red Scare. Each player is either a Patriot (making films according to the restrictive codes of the time) or a Communist (simply making films). Their roles are secret but there are fewer Communists than Patriots. However at the start of the game the Communists all know who their fellow Communists are.

The game is played in up to seven rounds. In each round a film genre is chosen, and then the players assist or hinder each other in playing propaganda cards onto it (marked either Communist or Patriot, naturally). Certain film genres have an inherent bias - Animation is Patriotic, but Horror is Communist, for example. Each player has a role on the files (Screenwriter, Director, Actor and so forth), and they give the player certain abilities to influence what happens. There is also a mechanism whereby players can be blacklisted, preventing them from influencing a particular film.

At the end of the round the cards played on the film are reviewed and the side with the most propaganda on it wins that film. A team wins if they win four films (hence the limit of seven rounds).

As you can see above, it's a lovely game, that fits very nicely into a compact box that looks like an old bound book. It's also great fun to play, with just the right level of paranoia and suspicion. 

We ended up playing three games of it, because people enjoyed it so much. The Communists won the first game, the Patriots the second and then the Communists walked the third game 4-0, despite us working out who they were early on. They got a lucky run of films with a Communist bias, and then made sure that the Patriot players were blacklisted to prevent them from shifting the bias.

For a hidden roles game it actually plays OK as a one-, two- or three-player game as well. There are a number of changes to the setup and rules, and it's not as good as the multi-plyer version, but it is playable, making it a good value game, especially if you can't always get the numbers of people you need.

For the second half of the evening we got out Ticket To Ride, which saw us through to just before midnight. I did very badly, but Eric won by such a huge margin that the scores of the other three players were irrelevant as well. It was a fun game for all that.

Anyway, I hope you had a great holiday period, got to play some games and that the year ahead will see plenty of die being rolled and cards flipped.