Game Review: Flat Acting

By Jonathan Degann
November 1, 2009

Designers: Mark & Matthew Anticole
Publisher: Eye-Level Entertainment

Players: 2-5
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Four, three times with 3 players and once with 5

Shimmer is a floor wax!
No, new Shimmer is a dessert topping!
It’s a floor wax!
No, it’s a dessert topping!
Hey, hey, hey, calm down. It’s both a floor wax AND a dessert topping!

The new game Flat Acting, by Mark and Matthew Anticole, promises to do for board games what Shimmer does for aerosole products. On one level it is a family game of strategy that fits in the genre of Eurogames. On another level, it is a story-telling game that relies heavily on its theme to encourage players to creatively explain some pretty weird hijinks on a movie set.

In the world of Flat Acting, four different genres of movies are somehow competing for dominance in the same movie. Each player controls one genre – romance, western, detective, or spooky – and attempts to play his appropriate actors on the board in a fairly straightforward battle for majority control of areas. In addition, there is a fifth, neutral set of playing pieces, the crew, who are just taking up space. (I’ll bet that’s how some actors feel in real life.) The “set” suffers from a similar multiple personality disorder, having various locations (garden, western town, house/office, cemetery) which any of these actors might appear on. This basic game could work well enough as a typical thinly themed Euro, but the designers take it a step further. Anytime a player introduces an actor onto the set, he must explain what’s going on in the story. Why? Because. It’s just a rule, and if you forget, you get penalized.

Stripped of its theme, the game play should seem fairly familiar. The board consists of areas with values between 3 and 11. Doors connect many adjacent areas. The playing pieces, or “actors,” come in each of the five genres, which are color coded. So the spooky movie, for example, has sundry vampires, zombies, lawyers and skeletons. They are numbered from 1-5 with two of each number: a total of 10 per genre. Each player represents a genre, and he wants majority control of his pieces in as many high scoring areas as possible. An eight-point area can hold up to eight points worth of actors, and at the end of the game, the full eight points go to the player controlling the greatest total value of pieces there.

On your turn, you draw a card, which might show the two red (romance) 3-point actors. This means you must place a 3-point romance actor in a space that can support it, or else move an appropriate piece already on the board through a door to an adjacent area that can support it. Note that you might be representing gray (spooky), so since you drew a romance actor, you must play it defensively. The game continues this way – draw a card, and place or move an appropriate actor – until a player draws a card that can’t be acted upon. Suppose you need to add or move a 4-point detective movie actor, they’re both on the board, and all the adjacent rooms don’t have capacity for a 4-point actor. At that point the game ends immediately (and often abruptly). Score it up and see who wins.

There are a couple of wrinkles. Most notably, ties are really unfriendly in the manner of games like Raj. In a 10-point area, if spooky and western both have 4 points and detective has 2 points, the leaders cancel out and all 10 points go to detective. This obviously enables some strategic play that can enable a low-valued actor to upstage some stars. The other wrinkle is that in a four-player game where the blue “crew” pieces are unclaimed, those pieces are removed when it comes time to score. So if a room has 5 points of crew, 2 of western and 1 of romance, then the crew is removed and the points go to western.

To add a little more chaos and “take that,” there are also purple cards which players collect and can use to upset the proceedings: swapping actors, removing them from the board, or otherwise rearranging things.

Now that’s the floor wax. The dessert topping plays off the “wacky” theme. When you draw and place that gumshoe actor in the graveyard, you need to explain it: “The detective goes into the graveyard and spots a walking zombie. He notes the zombie has an uncanny resemblance to his client’s missing boyfriend.”

What do you do with that story tidbit? Well, nothing. It’s just that if you forget to say something – anything – another player can yell “Cut” and change your move. In practice, there’s a question as to when it’s permissible to say “Cut” and in varying games we either determined it was okay when it was “obvious” the player forgot (go figure that out) or when he took his hand off the piece. No rules help you on this. Now whether this enhances the game or not depends on the people playing, how creative they are, and how much they’ve had to drink. With not very creative people, the rule can slow the game down for no good reason. “Uhhhh… the detective.... uhhhh..... he’s in the graveyard and he.... uhh… walks around.” With more creative people, the rule slows the game down, but hopefully generates some entertainment and laughter. I played with three different groups of people. Some liked the storytelling rule; most didn’t, and in no case did I ever find the results to be all that entertaining. You place the ingenue girl on the western street and… most of the time there just isn’t anything all that clever to say about it. It’s triply more difficult to try to string it together into a funny narrative. There’s nothing that prevents you from dispensing with the storytelling part of the game and just playing the strategy game.

So how is that strategy game? Despite some promising mechanics, the game lives down to its name. Flat. The game as described by the rules seems promising: Play pieces, often not your own, then shuffle them around in a war of dominance. Superficially, the game would seem to resemble Stefan Dorra’s Kreta, an excellent game which also involves area control, moving pieces, and limits on how much can be placed in a given area. However, Flat Acting tends to grind down. Most damaging is the fact that you must play the card you draw. In theory, there is lots of opportunity for defensive play, as you must determine how to place your opponents’ pieces in a way that does the least good for them. In practice, you are playing your own pieces only 1 out of 5 times and playing other pieces 4 out of 5 times. The defensive moves you can choose from are often of limited interest. Players who don’t get to place good pieces of their own wind up frustrated. Realistically, you might have only 4-5 significant beneficial moves in a game. The mobility of the pieces, which makes a game like Kreta so dynamic, has very limited effect here. Often, moving a piece will not have a strong effect. As the board fills, the more powerful pieces get locked in because of the limitations within a room.

The game does have a sort of story arc, but not one that makes the game engaging. In the beginning of the game, when the board is wide open, you’ll find that your moves seem inconsequential. Most of the times you’re placing an opponent’s piece, so if you draw a 4 or a 5 you’ll try to stick it in a room where it can do the least benefit. Later on, the consequence of moves becomes clearer, but the moves are often scripted, with obviously bad and obviously good choices. Then the game ends. In each game I’ve played, the leaders were fairly self evident, but there was no sense that they played a better game. “Oh, Tom won. Yeah, I tried stopping him, but the cards never showed up. Tom, what’s your secret?” Tom shrugs.

I played one last time without bothering with the story-telling element, and I found that the game improved for me slightly. When players aren’t burdened with adding a storyline to each move, the game at least moves at a clip that makes it less vexing. This gives some greater feeling of control if only because less time is spent waiting for a meaningful move.

The producers have put some care into the components, and the overall production has a solid feel. The actors are on sturdy cardboard that fits into stands and create a colorful look on the board. The board pieces themselves are solid and all the art is clean. The box and boards have that super-glossy look which is common with games manufactured in China. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but it’s not chintzy. The art is a bit cartoony and juvenile, full of more cheerful whimsy than real wit. In practice, the presentation was not super friendly to game play. The two-dimensional pieces frequently needed to be rotated and checked as one player or another cannot read what’s on it, depending on the facing. It was just a minor nuisance. The cards are on a reasonably strong stock, but have no flex to them, and so are difficult to shuffle.

There seems to be a good deal of game smarts that went into the design of the game. It has many superficial aspects that reflect knowledge picked up from playing a variety of Euros. Flat Acting attempts to bring tried and true mechanics into a breezy game that is suitable for the family. Perhaps, for the family brought up on The Game of Life and Uno, Flat Acting will go down easily enough so that most won’t care about the lack of control. However, if you’re looking for a real “game,” you’re likely to find that Flat Acting isn’t your genre.

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