Roll Camera: The B-Movie Expansion

About

1-4 Players | 45-90 minutes

Category: Expansion, Dice, Movie theme

Mechanisms: Card Drafting, Dice Rolling, Communication Limits

Roll Camera: The B-Movie Expansion, designed by Malachi Ray Rempen and John Velgus, published by Keen Bean Studio, is the expansion to Roll Camera. Players are producers of a struggling film studio trying to make a successful film.

Working together, players must complete a movie by shooting five scenes. On a turn, a player will roll the crew dice and assign them to take a variety of actions, including building sets, placing crew on sets, pitching ideas, and resolving problems. Each player takes on a specific role, such as Director or Production Designer, bringing their own unique powers and personality. To win, the players must complete the movie and have it be good enough quality, without running out of time or budget.

The B-Movie Expansion adds a new genre mechanic, the new Equipment card type, and a ton of additional content.

SERVICES PROVIDED

• Expansion Design

• Content Design

• Playtest Coordination

• Useability

• Editing

• Blind Testing

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Malachi Ray Rempen and I were co-designers of Roll Camera: The B-Movie Expansion. Malachi designed the original Roll Camera base game, and additionally he was also the artist, publisher, and client of this project. Malachi was a joy to work with, incredibly helpful, and very passionate about the project. I also acted as developer for the project, throughly testing and refining the designs into polished gameplay. This was a project of firsts: my first time working on a cooperative game, my first time working on an expansion, and my first time with a co-designer. For this job I was hired through and representing Brieger Creative.

The B-Movie Expansion is thematically and mechancially focused on incorporating film genres, like Western or Horror, into the movie making process. Working with Malachi, I deepened the proposed system for genre token manipulation. As an additional win condition, players now also needed their completed movie to have specific genre tokens. Each of the game's five genre types has an associated genre token. These tokens spawn on newly revealed Scene cards, and players could add, swap, remove, and interact with genre tokens in a variety of other ways. This created more thinky gameplay with an approachable token manipulation puzzle.

During development I created the entirely new system of Equipment cards. This new card type provides players with a powerful single-use ability, and players are provided three face-up Equipment cards for each game. Equipment cards were originally conceived to offset the added difficulty of the new genre requirement in a more strategic way than just providing additional starting budget or time. These were later expanded into a full 15 card set, providing an additional major selling point and adding strong replayability.

Additionally, there was a ton of new content created for the game including 6 Player Boards (18 unique powers), 15 Problem cards, 15 Idea cards, 20 Middle Script cards, 2 New Mainboard Actions, and 75 Scene cards. Drawing from my background in video and film, I helped with much of the theming and flavor text.

“Thanks Velgus!!! It has been a genuine pleasure working with you on this. You were tireless, very thorough, and careful in your development. Important to me, you are also a great communicator – always informing me of every detail and update. You made it extremely easy (and relieving) to trust you with the finer points of the design. You nailed it from the theme to the mechanisms, and everything in between.” – Malachi Ray Rempen, Keen Bean Studio, Co-Designer and Client

Project Highlight: REMOVING A GAME MODE

A large part of my contract was to refine a brand new semi-cooperative / competitve mode. The foundation of this mode would have players competing to get the most victory points while still needing to work together to complete a movie.

The original prototype of semi-cooperative mode delivered to me had players completing secret objectives to earn individual points. Play testers didn't love this. There wasn't enough depth or strategy, it felt very random, and players had little clear incentive to work with each other, even if it had some fun surprises and theming.

I explored many versions of a semi-cooperative mode during the project. These variations all featured a variety of ways to score individual points, each player having their own pool of money, and a mix of public and private scoring — collectively giving players tangible resources they could negotiate with and providing opportunity for strategy while still keeping some of the surprise of the unknown.

Despite this effort, the best versions of any kind of competitive mode were only OK to players. There were some core issues that persisted from the original base game that was built to be strictly cooperative. Number of players, balance of content, and especially the cooperative nature of having to work together across multiple turns, all of which were non-issues and often benefits in cooperative mode, were disastrous for semi-cooperative. Yes, these issues probably could be designed around with new gameplay, rule exceptions, and removing certain cards for semi-cooperative mode, but it would be a complex mess that wouldn't even feel like Roll Camera any more.

After much exploration and discussions, the client agreed with my recommendation to scrap the semi-cooperative mode entirely. Removing it allowed us to explore new design space and interesting effects in the expansion. The additional box space and cost designated for the mode was now free for the client to include upgraded components and new content. It was a tough call, but one we could make with confidence backed up by strong playtesting and analysis to create a stronger product.

PRAISE FOR ROLL CAMERA: THE B-MOVIE EXPANSION

2022 Golden Geek Best Board Game Expansion Nominee
2023 UK Games Expo Best Expansion Judges Award Winner
2023 UK Games Expo Best Expansion Nominee

“The base game was already top ten of the year for me. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this expansion… pushes Roll Camera! Into my number one game of the year.” – Richard Ham, Rahdo Runs Through

“I love the chaos and the picture it paints, and the hectic meandering studio scene. It mixes just the right amount of theme and flavor for me to really feel like I can experience the struggles of film production. And it does so in a cooperative but still challenging board game puzzle. I think if you like Roll Camera already, if you’ve been impressed by what this game does, the B-Movie expansion is a no brainer to go ahead and enhance your game system.” – Jesse Anderson, Quackalope