Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Disclosure: Meeple Mountain was provided a pre-production copy of the game. It is this copy of the game that this review is based upon. As such, this review is not necessarily representative of the final product. All photographs, components, and rules described herein are subject to change.
The prototype for the upcoming game Schlock!: B-Movie Magnate (designed by Rob van Zyl and Simon Weinberg, and published by Pleasant Company Games) made the rounds on our Slack’s review copy channel without being picked up. I waited until other Meeple Mountain contributors had first-crack at this game before raising my hand. I think I’m the biggest movie nerd on the team, but still, maybe someone else wanted to talk shop and play a game that leaned into something they love more than I do.
But no one bit. I received a copy of Schlock! a few weeks before the game’s crowdfunding campaign, but I couldn’t finish three plays before the campaign launched. That’s because I was only able to initially do a solo play and a two-player game of Schlock!, and the rules are a little different with three or four players.
Now that I’ve finished a third play, with four players, I’m ready to share my story. Schlock! has the look and feel of a word game I can get behind. But the production value of this prototype’s high notes are balanced with a game that simply comes down to matching colors to achieve victory. I wish more of the game’s theme pushed into the game’s win conditions.
Lagoon of the Cosmic Bandit Virus
Schlock!: B-Movie Magnate is a word game for 1-4 players. In my experience, it plays in about 30 minutes regardless of player count.
The game’s round structure is delightfully simple. Each player runs a movie theater business with three theaters, each of which needs to be filled with the words needed to build out a complete title, which might include a theme, a setting, a villain, and silly stuff like end frames that announce “in Technicolor!” or “Adults Only!”
In a round, each player has two tokens that are used to draft a pool of words from a display, which can either be slotted into a movie theater’s marquee or exchanged with other word tiles on The Cutting Room Floor. (The Cutting Room Floor is an area of the board. Still, it’s a funny use of the term “cutting room floor” for any of us movie junkies in attendance.)
Then, players can release their B-movie flicks if their small, medium, or large marquee is completed. A short administrative/clean-up phase rounds out the process, and play continues until one player has completed three movies before end-game scoring.
Each tile has one of three colors along the right-hand side, indicating audience preferences, with a fourth color used as a wild that can take the place of the other three colors. Also, audience pawns are among the items that can be drafted during the first part of a round. During end-game scoring, all that matters is that you build up the right colors of audience members with the kinds of movies those audience members love. Each theater can hold up to three audience pawns.
In an ideal world, players should find a way to get three pawns in a single color, with a bunch of movie tiles that are also lined up with that audience’s color. Do that, and you’ll get some big point bonuses at the end of the game.
Evil Fiend Army in the Ghost Town Outer World
Schlock!: B-Movie Magnate should be a party game about making up the funniest movie titles, like B-Movies. And, at times, it is as players build up movie titles based on each round’s draft, ending up with the section headers you have seen so far in this article.
But a few things get in the way. First, I would not recommend Schlock! as a solo experience. There’s no one else to laugh with. In a game that actually has a voting function for best movie title if you play it with three or four players.
Second, the way titles are built can look a little wobbly. Setting tiles can be placed in a movie title, but only in certain positions within a player’s marquee board. Movies don’t have to have a setting—or, they could even have two or three settings.
Some small tiles, known as “flavor” tiles, must be used to either appear before, or after, setting or villain tiles. There are transition tiles used to bridge the gap between a setting and a villain, but those aren’t always required to build out a movie title if the background color of those tiles matches. In limited cases, players were not able to find the specific tiles they needed to finish out a board, and the exchange rate for new tiles from the Cutting Room Floor can feel steep.
There are rules regarding where audience members can go in a player’s theater, so drafting the right people becomes key. But thematically, it didn’t always feel right to me that I’ve got a theater full of people who are mismatched to the movie they are slated to see. Wouldn’t they just bail if they were horror fans but found themselves in a theater about to show a western?
I liked the idea of the tension tied to drafting new tiles; the lots that have the most tiles force a player to fall lower in turn order for the following round. But in some cases, the lots with the fewest tiles and an audience member who fit exactly what I needed were in the position that allowed me the chance to both get exactly what I needed AND go first again in the next round. Is that what nature intended?
Schlock! feels like a game that should only play with a minimum of at least three players, with four being ideal. At one or two players, the game features almost none of the magic that surfaced during my four-player game. Voting on the best movie title was a fun moment in that play—the eventual winner of the “Golden Popcorn” award went to the player who came up with the title Revenge of the Insane Cannibal Piranhas Beyond the Church High School, which makes no sense and sounds like a B-movie I could get behind.
Schlock!: B-Movie Magnate comes with an expansion that offers slightly dirtier, more realistic B-movie titles from yesteryear. For players who are only playing with other adults, Schlock! The X-Pansion is a must and certainly adds a lot more color depending on the tiles that come out during the game.
Schlock!: B-Movie Magnate isn’t bad, but I would only attack this one with at least three players who all love low-budget motion pictures.
