Game review: Reels & Deals

Growing up I always enjoyed gaming. Board games, role playing games, video games, pc games, loved them all and spent way to much time playing them all.

But the one area that I never caught on with was the card based games. Never played Magic: The Gathering (although I do have a box of first series cards somewhere). I was way to old for the likes of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! when they started to pop up.

Then came a little game called Munchkin. Technically I started with Super Munchkin and then moved on to Munchkin, but Munchkin none the less. And with that I started to have a bit more appreciation for card based games.

As always I was looking for great new games. I had had some great suggestions also you my fellow GeekSix readers. But what I stumbled into was a card game named Reels & Deals: The Movie Making Card game.

Some readers may recall that I tend to frequent Wheel of Time mud. Over the many years I have spent there, I have met quite an array of people and characters. One of those was a man named Eric Kesselman. He was really my administrator trainer on WoTmud. He was a world ranked Magic: The Gathering player. And he is quite the card player (poker, not Old Maid) today as well.

It had been a while since we had spoken and I reached out to find out what was going on. It seems he took all that card playing experience of his and started his own business, Agman Games,with his wife Asha Agnish.  And from that was borne Reels & Deals. Agman Games was nice enough to provide GeekSix with a demo copy of the game.

The first thing you can tell from both the cards and the rules is that there was a lot of effort put into Reels & Deals. This was not going to be some fancy artwork with a bunch of convoluted rules to a game that had no point and purpose.

I admit, reading through the rules page the first time around had me rereading a couple of times to wrap my brain around it. But it was diving into the game and just playing that made everything make sense. It is a very intuitive game when used with the rules as a reference.

So basic premise? Cards fall into various categories, actors, actresses, directors, films. Each film has certain conditions that must be met in order to get it released, whether that is a certain level of director, or a certain number of actors or actresses. You start with a budget which powers your ability to hire actors and directors, and buy scripts.

As you release films, you gain more cash and points. And to win, you need your points. To bring the game to an end, a player has to release two films, one of which is a feature film (more star power, spending more bucks, more points). He/she standing at the end with the most points wins.

And the nice thing about the endgame? It is not simply a race to get movies released. That means strategy. And just because you push your two movies out the fastest, the game keeps going to complete the round. And if at the end of that round someone manages to push out a blockbuster of a movie (lots of points, lots of cash), you might just be on the outside of the winner’s circle looking in.

And that is what the nice thing of the game really boils down to, it can be played by mixed level of gamers at the same time. Novice gamers will enjoy the humor of the different stars on the cards and the theme of the game while experienced gamers can dive into the strategy of the game and not be hampered by an overabundance of mundane rules.

All in all, two thumbs up and a recommendation that this should be included in your weekly game nights. Or if you don’t have a game night, here is a great game with which to start one.