A few months ago a good buddy shared his idea for a new project he was working on, a project that I immediately knew was going to be awesome. Fast forward to today and that project is on the brink of becoming a reality and I couldn’t be happier. What am I talking about? My friend and fellow nostalgia buff, Tommy Day from Top Hat Sasquatch has developed a wicked awesome card game called Buy the Rights. In a nutshell, it’s a cinema-themed party game where the players develop movie pitches based on a mix of Plot, Genre, Hero, & Hero Descriptor cards they draw. Each turn players pitch their movie to a producer who has a set budget to spend any way they see fit. Then the role of producer passes on to the next character, everyone else draws new cards and makes pitches, and so on. At the end of the game the player with the most money wins.
Being a huge movie buff (I do co-host a podcast about Cult Films) and an avid game player I was immediately sold on the concept. And now Tommy has taken the game to Kickstarter to raise the funds to get the game properly manufactured and into the hands of gaming enthusiasts everywhere. Before he launched the campaign Tommy had a batch of prototypes printed up and my girlfriend Jaime and I were lucky enough to receive a copy to play-test. Recently we had a bunch of friends over for a cookout and figured it was the perfect opportunity to pull out the game ad kick the tires a bit…
As I mentioned, the game is comprised of four decks of cards, Plot, Genre, Hero, & Hero Descriptor. Each deck has 100 different cards, so there are almost limitless combinations that can be formed when devising movie pitches. Half of the fun of the game is trying to put together a halfway coherent idea with the randomly drawn cards, and the other half of the fun is “selling” the pitch to the producer. So when the best movie idea in your hand is Horror Film (Genre) about a Dyslexic Plumber (Descriptor & Hero cards), who has to play a championship basketball game against aliens (plot), you really have to pull out the charisma to get the producer on your side. In all seriousness, the game is a lot of fun and while we were playing we were constantly laughing at the pitches…
Buy the Rights follows in the tradition of games like Cards Against Humanity and Apples to Apples, and is perfect for both audiences (it can be played perfectly clean, or depending on the players and ages can get pretty hilariously “adult”.)
I was also super stoked to have Tommy commission me to draw a piece of Buy the Rights art for the Kickstarter campaign. Right now if you pledge at certain levels you can get a nifty vinyl sticker of this piece I illustrated…
There’s a lot of fun rewards too, aside from the game itself which is the real gem, there’s also a really swell print that was illustrated by Cole Roberts, as well as a cool T-Shirt.
So if this seems like something you’d be interested in, please take a few minutes to check out the campaign, watch the video, and help Tommy make Buy the Rights a reality. This one fully gets the Branded in the 80s stamp of approval!
