by Mal Rempen
The Inciting Incident
In August 2017 I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Itchy Feet: The Travel Game, a card game based on my web comic, fully believing that to be the beginning and end of my flirtation with the world of tabletop games. I figured if I were lucky, I’d raise $15k, break even, have a neat bit of merch for the comic’s followers, and that would be that. Instead, the campaign raised over $113,000, to my utter disbelief and astonishment, not to mention that of my friends and family! After printing and fulfillment was complete, my wife encouraged me to make another game. “You’d be stupid not to”, were her exact words. The gears started turning in my head.
My career and passion was filmmaking. Since I was ten years old, I’d been directing movies. I went to film school in LA, worked in Hollywood, freelanced in Europe, and helped build and lead a film school in Berlin. The web comic was just a fun side thing; I was a filmmaker. Then, in December 2018, I was in the Berlin metro on my way to a Christmas party, listening to an episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast about indie board games, when the host began talking about the explosion in the variety of themes that modern board games were experiencing. And it suddenly struck me: What about a board game about making a movie?
It was so obvious! Shooting a film has so many parallels with playing a co-operative board game: You work together, each with a specific role that has “special abilities”, moving people and things around in a defined physical area under specified rules, motivated by ever-dwindling resources while challenges escalate. I mean, come on, storyboard scenes are already the shape of playing cards! This thing designs itself!
It seemed SO obvious that I was sure it had been done before, but I found that most “movie-making” games, like Dream Factory or Hollywood, were from a studio executive’s perspective — matching actor types with scripts, that sort of thing — and they were all competitive. That didn’t interest me. I wanted a game that captured my own indie filmmaking experience: what it’s like to work together under the pressure of time, budget, and everything going wrong, toward that strange intangible artistic goal of cinema. THAT is real movie magic and something worth sharing, so that Christmas in my in-law’s house, I got to work.
The First Few Takes
My first attempt at the design was the most literal: Players had roles that made decisions on what to do and could “veto” each other in ways that mirrored actual film team hierarchy. The board was a movie set with a hex grid on which you placed crew and equipment. And that was pretty much it.
I played one game of this version with my brother, who said in his politest voice possible, “Well…it isn’t very fun.” I realized I had gone TOO literal. The simulationist approach wouldn’t work; I needed at least one level of abstraction that would allow players to get into the world of the game.
Being relatively new to this industry, I didn’t know of many board games at the time, and I didn’t really know BGG too well either, so I asked my board gamer friend whether he knew of any games that featured a crew. He suggested I borrow his copy of Tony Go‘s excellent Deep Space D-6. This game was a revelation: The crew are dice, and their roles are different faces on a set of custom d6s. You assign them to areas of the ship based on which faces you roll, and one face is a (!), which accumulate to spawn enemies. It’s like Faster Than Light: the solo board game. It’s awesome — and it was exactly what I needed, so I borrowed this core mechanism wholesale to see if it provided the abstraction I needed.
Later on, when it became clear that the crew dice placement mechanism was here to stay, I reached out and asked Tony whether he was okay with me using the idea. He graciously gave the project his blessing. I didn’t technically need it, of course, but I felt better with it. I wanted him to feel not that something had been taken away from him, but rather that his work had inspired something new. Credit where credit is due! Thanks, Tony.
Now, although this first dice-based version was of course riddled with early-design issues like over-complication — two types of custom dice, one for crew and another for equipment, a checklist for shooting a scene?? — and imbalance, it was almost immediately fun to play. Most of the fundamental elements of the final game’s design are in that image above: a rolling market of shot cards to shoot, problems that crop up, the steady downward march of budget and schedule, and the tension of the limited die faces pulling you in different directions — classic dice placement at its best. Although the crew dice was (and remains) the least directly thematic thing about the game — on a real film set you obviously don’t just get a random assortment of crew each day — it delivered that dead accurate filmmaking feeling of having to do too much all at once with very little, as well as the uncertainty of what each new shooting day will bring. Overall, I was delighted. The game was working!
And best of all, right at this point the game’s title smacked me in the face at about 100 miles an hour. I was reading about Roll Player, thinking about that pun and what variant might work for filmmaking given the dice mechanism, when — WHAM, there it was: Roll Camera! It was just too perfect.
The Kuleshov Effect
But the game still had these many design issues to iron out. Chief among them, the film set area was wayyyyy too static. It just felt really stiff to assign actors, lights, and other equipment to these fixed spaces on the set area. Real filmmaking is incredibly dynamic; you are always moving around into different formations and patterns as required by the scene. The hex grid on my first iteration let you really place anything anywhere you wanted, which was great. I still had all these individual pieces for crew and equipment. But now they were cubes. Hmm. What if…A-HA!
Once again, this set grid was a step toward abstraction and away from simulation — and yet, once again it far more accurately captured the real-world filmmaking process. Weird!
I was learning a LOT at this point about the relationship between theme and mechanisms in board game design, especially about the inverse relationship between fidelity and authenticity. I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words for you at the time, but I was realizing that very often, the more a game component LOOKED like the thing it was trying to represent, the less it actually FELT like that same thing when engaged with — and the reverse was also true, to a point.
It was still early 2019, over a year before I discovered Pax Pamir: Second Edition, still today my go-to example of this idea made perfect. Give me resin blocks over high-detail minis any day of the week. I would argue that this relates to the old filmmaking rule of thumb that the monster is scarier if you DON’T see it (see: Jaws, Alien), or that old true but useless writing tip: “Show, don’t tell.” Your imagination filling in the blanks is far more fertile and emotionally engaging than anything that could be detailed for you by someone else. In fact, the more you detail, the less relatable it becomes. Cinema is at the height of its powers when it suggests, and so, I now believe, are board games.
Anyway, if you scroll back up to that image, you’ll notice another new addition to the game’s design: the dual-sided quality track under the set area and above the budget. Initially my idea was to try to be funny and suggest that you couldn’t make a film that was both good and popular; you had to choose one of the two, a sort of meta-commentary on my part. So, some scenes when shot would push the meter up in popularity, while others would push it toward awards. Popularity would gain you money, awards would gain you bonuses.
It’s a fun idea that made it pretty far down the line until later on a filmmaker friend of mine played a prototype and immediately said, “So you can’t make Gladiator?” I don’t really like Gladiator, but I took his point. I could foresee this smart-alecky comment coming at me over and over after publication, so I later changed this meter to overall quality, if only to save myself the annoyance. It managed to maintain its dual-sided nature; in the final design you have to make a film that’s either “Not Bad” or better, or “So Bad It’s Great”, but nothing mediocre, which still today manages to get a laugh whenever I teach the game the first time.
Places, People! Picture’s Up!
Around this point the design was stable enough that I thought I should start prototyping a physical prototype of the game with a wider group of people.
Hoo baby, that’s ugly. Yes, it’s literally scrapped together with tape and a cardboard box. I did try consciously to be spartan with the layout at this point. I didn’t want to do more artwork and graphic design than was absolutely necessary (for some reason I felt the shot card artwork WAS necessary), mostly to save myself the hassle of redoing it later, and which I now know is the rule of thumb in game design.
But, I learned, withholding graphic design does come at a UX cost. I figured I could just cram everything together like a condensed wireframe and it would be at its easiest to playtest — but it wasn’t. In fact, despite its minimalism, players found this version of the game confusing. Eventually I realized this wasn’t due to the gameplay itself, but rather how the gameplay presented itself through its “interface” on the board and cards.
This was a really valuable lesson: Graphic design, artwork, and gameplay are intimately fused, at least for me. I honestly have no idea how other publishers can manage to put a game together taking design, art, and graphic design from separate places. I get that these people usually work together, but I doubt they can afford the continuous sort of iterative back-and-forth between the three areas that I did on Roll Camera. I guess that’s what more experience will earn you.
Playing with the first physical prototype inspired me to give shot cards — later renamed “scene” cards to avoid confusing “shoot a shot” type language in the rulebook — two sides: a “before” side and an “after” side. This cleared up an annoyance I had early on that scenes in the editing room, after being “shot”, still looked like storyboard sketches; now they could have a colorful “cinematic” side to show they’re “in the can”, as they say. This change also allowed me to put different information on each side of the card. This, in turn, gave me an opportunity to make the “editing” part of the game a bit more interesting.
Above are some scene cards that have been “shot” and are in the editing room side of the board. On the right side of the cards you’ll see their bonus (movie tickets = popularity, laurel wreaths = awards, as described earlier), as well as numbers and arrows pointing down. Until now I was finding in my testing that there was no reason to put the scene cards in any particular order after the film had been shot, which again didn’t feel very thematic; of course editing can dramatically alter your final film. So the idea here was that adjacency would matter; certain scenes would impact other scenes above and below them. It would be a little efficiency puzzle to try to maximize your film’s output based on the arrangement of the scenes.
Personally, I really liked this puzzle as it was tense and many of the modifying numbers were high enough to make editing a central part of gameplay, but players ultimately found it confusing to read. Around this time I read about Isle of Skye, in which at set-up, four scoring tiles (out of many) are revealed to determine which tile patterns will award victory points. I loved the replayability that this offered, so inspired by this, I created “script” cards that were set out anew each game, then assigned the scene cards different colors. The adjacency of colors in the editing room provided the patterns that would score variously according to the script.
This was the best kind of design choice because it killed a flock of birds with one stone: Editing was important again, space on the scene cards was freed up, and I got the thematic one-two punch of adding a movie script PLUS giving scenes colors, which corresponded to their “emotional content”, informed by the artwork. It all just came together so well.
I’ll Be In My Trailer
There’s one more mechanism present in this iteration that I really loved, but which had to get cut, that this gives me the chance to talk about: the crew mood.
I wanted a dynamic way for idea cards (the helpful kind of card) and problem cards (the unhelpful kind) to enter the game. Deep Space D-6 has an “alert” system in which one face of each crew die is a (!) that must be slotted into an alert area; three alerts draws a new enemy. I also had this in early versions, but pretty quickly I needed the real estate on the dice and abandoned it. Instead, I came up with this mechanism in which the game’s bonuses and penalties would be meted out by how the crew is feeling, represented by a big “crew mood” die. At the start of your turn, you’d roll the die, then place it on the corresponding area on the mood track and get the bonus or penalty. You could then later use various cards and/or dice placement slots to impact the crew’s mood, mitigating the randomness.
On paper, I loved this system for two reasons. First, that big chunky fun crew mood die would have made a great component (just look at that thing!), and second, I loved what it said about the theme. The reality of filmmaking (or any kind of group work really) is that morale is absolutely critical. The difference between crappy sodium-heavy snacks and healthy ones, for example, can quite literally make or break a shooting day in the real world. It’s important to take care of your crew and think about their well-being. I liked that this mechanism gave a face to these otherwise poor abstracted dice-people working for you. They are people, too, you know! It seemed only fair that their mood should have some power to swing your film’s production.
But the problems with it were pretty glaring. You can probably already tell it’s not very interesting, gameplay-wise. It’s also awkward to have your turn involve first rolling a die, then rolling more, different dice. Even if you can mitigate the crew mood roll to your advantage, between the mood and crew dice it just felt very arbitrary to have so many game systems connected to random dice chucks.
And if you DO get the mitigation under control, then problems don’t come up at all, which is also not fun, even though you’re technically playing well. Too much was tied up into one roll of the die, so the crew mood was scrapped, and nobody missed it but me. Maybe this thematic idea will find its way into one of my future games, but with a stronger design to back it up.
Dramatic Arc
Playtesting continued through 2019. I iterated quickly. I knew I was on to something here because players were always fully engaged with the game’s puzzle, and almost always the tension increased as budget and schedule dwindled and came down to the wire near the final turns. Players seemed to win the game more often than not, but at the same time almost always expressed at least once during the game, “Oh no, we’re going to lose!” in desperation. I felt this was a strong feature. If the game could always feel like it COULD have tipped into failure near the end, it didn’t matter if there were more wins than losses. This would later be tweaked with difficulty levels, of course.
The best feedback I got, however, which encouraged me to stay the course, came from my fellow filmmaking friends and colleagues, who almost without fail would say after playing: “This feels exactly like making a movie.” In fact, even today I hear reports of people from the film industry avoiding Roll Camera because it’s “Too much like work!” I love that.
Expanding the Call Sheet
There were still two major final pieces of the game’s design, both of which came into place after the playtest pictured below. My extended family and I were vacationing together in a castle in Ireland. (Hence the tapestry — castles are actually super reasonable on Airbnb, believe it or not!) It rained often because Ireland, so we played Roll Camera quite a bit. After this specific playtest with my brother and his girlfriend, she looked at me and said, “It’s fun, but why is this a game for more than one person?”
Oof.
But she was right. At the time, the game had no individual player roles or player boards and no hand of idea cards. It was quite literally multi-player solitaire; you just all worked together doing what one person could do by themselves. Not great.
Being new to the world of board games gave me some critical advantages in the design, development, and publishing of Roll Camera. As an outsider, I did not carry much baggage about what a board game “should” be, or (apart from my research of every dice-placement game in existence during design) what had been done before, or what the industry’s pulse was, or indeed care much what most people thought, so I was free to do pretty much whatever I liked without really feeling tied to anything in particular. I think that made Roll Camera feel in many ways that it “came out of nowhere,” mostly for the better.
But the flip side of this blissful ignorance was that I was not really part of the conversation about alpha players / quarterbacking in co-operative games, which meant I reinvented that particular wheel from SCRATCH. I’m really pleased with how positive the reception of the game has been on that point in particular, considering how little I knew going in. It could have gone really wrong. Ignorance is a dangerous bedfellow!
In the end, I was happy about my brother’s girlfriend’s critique because it gave me the opportunity to bring something back that hadn’t found a place in the design since the very first iteration: player roles!
Again, as with any satisfying design choice, the addition of player boards accomplished a few things. First, it let players feel that a part of the game was “theirs”, which I learned is psychologically important, especially for co-operation. Ironically, it’s harder to feel like you’re contributing if ownership over everything is shared. (There’s a political argument in there somewhere for someone cleverer than me.) It also gave them a “person” they could be, a role they could inhabit, and thematic games thrive on this role-playability. Plus it allowed me to fulfill on that final part of the filmmaking fantasy: being a named head of department. I’m the director! Do as I say! No, I’m the producer! I’m your boss! It’s just good fun.
This change also offered new dice-worker placement possibilities, which would vary depending on which player boards were in play. This was needed because the main board actions became kinda rote after a while. It didn’t take much effort to nerf those enough to make looking at your player board or other players’ boards a necessity to get out of a tough spot. Finally, individual player boards gave a reason for the players to suggest to each other what they could do on their turn or what others could do to contribute, making the game far more interactive. Home run!
Have Your People Call My People
The idea cards were the second system to get an overhaul, and the production meeting mechanism is one of the places where players and reviewers have said that the game offers something novel to the co-operative experience.
Well, I have to come clean: It wasn’t my idea. I mean sure, the idea cards were my idea, but they were fairly straightforward; if you played the production meeting action, any player could play an idea card from hand if they wanted to, then you decided how to use them. It was fine, but muddy. When I allowed anyone to pitch, it was almost never done by players when it wasn’t their turn. If I forced everyone to pitch, inevitably the other players used it to dump their “bad” idea cards because they didn’t want to overrule the active player.
I now, of course, can’t find it for the life of me, but I posted here on the BGG forums that I was stuck on this idea card system, and some intrepid user suggested that three idea cards would always be played: one to be activated immediately, one saved for later, and one discarded. The “saved for later” really brought the idea cards to life, because you knew that even if yours wasn’t picked, you could pitch something to be useful for the future — but there was always the risk it’d be discarded. Either way, none of the cards pitched could be returned to hand. This change just made the decision space around idea cards SO much more interesting. (Editor’s note: Josh Ellis suggested this idea here in Nov. 2019. —WEM)
Best of all, this change suddenly made players say things like “I have a GREAT idea!” or ask, “Does anyone have any ideas?” or suggest puckishly, “I have a terrible idea”, all of which work toward making the production meeting feel like a real meeting — because it is one.
This taught me a lot about strong language in game design. In many games, you hear players say something like, “I can pay two story points to activate that blue tile, so if you play that sword card we can gain that movement buff.” Hard to tell what that’s supposed to mean outside of the game’s systems. In Roll Camera, most of the components and actions are named such that during the game, players are speaking in the language of the theme. They will commonly say things like, “We’re running out of time, we have to shoot!” or “Let’s not resolve that problem now, let’s hold a production meeting!” or “Our film’s quality is terrible! You’re the director, can’t you compromise on the budget a bit?” All of which make you sound like you’re actually on a film set making a movie — or at least, what you THINK it actually sounds like on a film set making a movie, which is good enough!
This sort of naming wasn’t done consciously here; it just came naturally as a result of my goals with the design, but it made such an impression on me that it will be at the front of my mind in any future designs, that’s for sure.
Cheap, Fast, Good: Pick Two
The final bit of design worth mentioning involves what used to be called the clipboard:
Ooh, cinema-y. This component made it so far that it’s in the Kickstarter campaign video! I really liked the clipboard because it felt right to hold in your hands, just like actual important production paperwork for a film’s budget and schedule.
The intention was to print it on thick board and use clips for trackers so that it would be a REAL CLIP BOARD, get it? It just worked. But in the end, I couldn’t find good clips. Any existing clips the manufacturer had were made for card stock, and I didn’t want it to be flimsy card. I knew the clips would fray the edges, and anyway it’s not supposed to be flimsy. A clipboard is sturdy! But board-sized clips were either so tight they scraped the printed art or so loose they slid all over the place. It just wasn’t going to work.
Someone suggested I take a look at the Gloomhaven dials, and I did, but I wasn’t all that excited at first. I still wanted that clipboard. Eventually though, on a whim I threw together a sketch and the manufacturer made a prototype, and you know what? I was sold.
They felt good, I could give them a “film reel” look to at least keep things in the film theme, and best of all, I was able to print the difficulty levels on the back side of the dials, which is something I was having trouble with on the clipboard. To set up, flip the dials over to the back, set the difficulty according to your choice and player count, and on the front it’s ready to go. As usual, I’m most satisfied when a design choice can impact multiple areas and solve multiple problems at once — much like a good film scene, which ideally should be able to deliver information about characterization, background, plot, and setting, all at the same time.
The Martini
So there’s an overview of the design and development of Roll Camera! The game was originally published in 2021, but sold out quickly and the reprint is now available, along with editions in many languages and, of course, the anticipated B-Movie Expansion. I’ll say a bit about the design and development of that here as well.
The Cutting Room Floor
During Roll Camera’s design I had a few ideas that didn’t make the cut (appropriately enough). When the base game’s Kickstarter campaign did well, I figured it was worth exploring an expansion utilizing these leftover elements, and I did some initial design work.
I’ve got to be honest, I rediscovered these genre scene cards when I was rooting through my old Roll Camera box o’ prototypes for this diary. I had completely forgotten about them. You can tell they’re from a very early point in the design process because they have the little film reel icon, which dates the design to when the quality track was still popular vs awards, so the idea to incorporate genre scenes was there from very early on, but I never found a good place for them.
After Roll Camera! hit people’s tables, one of the most oft-repeated comments was the desire for “more scene cards!” This was a great way to find a new home for an old idea, and just like these initial genre card designs had their own little mini-mechanism (as indicated by the ghost and cowboy boot icons), so does the B-Movie Genre mechanism provide a new layer of challenge for players.
The second element was something I had planned until very late in the design: a semi-cooperative mode. My idea was, thematically, players could compete for “credit” on the film. Each action you took would earn you points, and the player with the most points won — IF the film was successfully completed on time, under budget, and of appropriate quality! If not, then the player with the FEWEST points would win. They could find another job unscathed, employing plausible deniability; it wasn’t THEIR fault the film had tanked!
Thematically I found this idea delightful, and I was sure it could work somehow. I turned out to be sorely mistaken. The game mode was cut entirely after months of trying and failing to make it work. It’s probably for the best.
At this point, I have to admit, I was pretty Roll Camera’d out. I was delighted that Roll Camera was getting such a warm reception, but I wanted to focus my design efforts on new games, ideas completely different than Roll Camera — and yet I knew it was time to strike with an expansion while the Roll Camera iron was hot, so I brought on development studio John Brieger Creative and co-designer John Velgus to help me bring my B-Movie Expansion ideas over the finish line. You can read all about the development of the genre mechanisms, a new equipment system, and the exorcism of the semi-coop mode on their excellent project debrief.
Post-Credits Sequence
After the successful Roll Camera and B-Movie campaigns, I found myself at something of a crossroads. Filmmaking has been my dream career since I was ten years old, and I was lucky to work in and around film for 25 years after that…and yet, here was a new (to me) medium — board games — that seemed to be extending its hand, offering a lesser-trodden path with a commercial potential and full creative control — every auteur’s dream.
The end result is that I have strayed from my filmmaking path to explore this new realm full-time. I can’t say I expected that turn of events, but I am so, so happy to be here. To anyone who has or will get Roll Camera or any of my games, thank you for helping make it possible.
I have many untold stories to tell and unexplored worlds to share, and the tabletop could just be the perfect place for them. See you there!
