Red Carpet – Capture Silver Screen Royalty

Hollywood loves to roll out the red carpet during awards season. The celebrities dress up and walk to the theater while cameras snap away. But what if you could get behind the lens of not just any red carpet walk, but one in April of 1956? Capture the images of stars like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and even Alfred Hitchcock as they take to the carpet.

In Red Carpet, players do exactly that. They take on the role of photographers, armed with their phones, calling for the attention of Hollywood’s greatest stars of the 1950s. Take the best photos from film’s biggest night of the year!

Red Carpet is for two to four players ages 8+ and lasts about 40 minutes. It was designed by Anna Lucini, Pau More, and Eloi Pujadas with art from Albert Monteys. It is published by Devir Games.

Setup

Set the main game board with the red carpet in the middle of the table. Then place the cordon boards with the sponsor logos next to the red carpet. Place the awards board at one end of the red carpet board. Place all figures on their corresponding stands (celebrities on gold, entourage figures on red) and set them aside.

Shuffle each of the kinds of cards separately: celebrity cards, limousines, photographers, and nominees.

Take the 10 nominee cards and then place them on the awards board face-up. Randomly place a sponsor token on each nominee.

Each player takes a set of matching score markers and phone tripod along with a player aid card. The first player is whoever most recently received an award.

Gameplay

At the start of every round flip a limousine card and place it against the red carpet. Draw two celebrity cards and place the matching characters on the corresponding spots facing in the directions indicated on the limousine card. Then place four entourage members in the remaining spaces – also aligned according to the limo card.

Now, deal five photographer cards to each player. Starting with the first player, each player takes turns performing actions, using one card each time:

• Vote – Place a card facedown on the awards board to vote for that specific celebrity to win an award.
• Get A Spot – The top-left of every card shows a camera with a number. Place your phone tripod in the matching spot on either side of the cordons.
• Move – The top-right corner of every card has some sort of movement icon: either towards the awards area, towards your tripod, or turning 180° to face the opposite direction.

After each player takes three turns, you’ll each have two cards remaining. Discard one and vote with the other one. This means you’re guaranteed to have at least one vote per round, but you can vote multiple times in a round if you don’t need all your actions to line up a perfect shot.

After voting, players take a photo of their desired celebrity. Place a phone in your tripod, ensuring the tripod stays completely inside the space you’ve chosen. Zoom to 2x to get the shot. You may slightly angle the phone and tripod to get the best photo possible.

After everyone takes their photos, show them to everyone else for impartial scoring based on the player aid cards:

• Three points if the celebrity is facing you
• Two points if nothing obstructs the celebrity’s face and shoulders with no other figures in front of them
• Two points if the celebrity is in the same row as the tripod
• Subtract one point for each entourage figure in the photo – if you can see their face, even partially
• Add one point for each sponsor logo in the photo matching that celebrity’s sponsor token on the board

After tallying the points for each photo, place the scoring marker on the corresponding spot on that celebrity’s card. You can only take one photo of each celebrity, so make it count!

At the end of the first four rounds, you will “clear the carpet” by moving the celebrities and entourage figures down the carpet if they occupy the first six spots on the red carpet. This can cause a cascading effect, eventually pushing figures off the carpet entirely. When that occurs, remove celebrity figures from the game while the entourage figures simply return to the limousine area for use as needed.

Then start a new round by flipping a new limousine card as above and continuing play.

End Of Game

After the final pictures are taken and scored at the end of the fifth round, reveal the votes. The leading vote-getter in each of the three columns is the award winner.

Why do we care who won the awards? Because the award winners and the lifetime achievement award winner (the celebrity off to the side by themselves), double the points for the scores on their cards.

Tally the scores together, and the player with the most points win. If there is a tie, the player who got the most points from photos of the award winners wins. If that results in a tie still, the tied players share the win.

Impressions

When I first saw Red Carpet at the Devir booth at PAX Unplugged, I was captivated. I had personally never played anything like it. Playing as paparazzi – where you actually use your phone camera to capture the figures on the red carpet? I thought it was pretty unique.

Also, I love the art by Albert Monteys. The celebrities look amazing with a comic vibe. The details are fantastic, like Hitchcock with a crow perched on his arm (The Birds, anyone?)

The visual details and the photography come together well. We enjoyed composing our shots as best as possible. Everything blends well together thematically.

Red Carpet is a very simple game at its core. Each round, you take three actions using your cards. You vote with one of your two remaining cards, then you snap that award-winning photo. This game truly can work for someone as young as eight, because there is no reading on any of the cards. Everything is represented by iconography.

However, despite its unique gameplay, Red Carpet dragged on for some of us – like awards shows sometimes do. My youngest, a nine-year-old, grew bored as we entered the third round. Before that, she enjoyed playing the cards and taking pictures. She played through all five rounds, but she was ready to be done before we tallied the scores.

Sometimes, you can feel a little unsure of how to best deploy your cards to get a great photo. Voting for different celebrities to boost your end-game points is great. But sometimes the cards don’t line up with any of the celebrities you’ve taken photos of so far – or any that are even on the carpet! My 15-year-old felt lost at times.

This isn’t to say Red Carpet is bad game. It’s not! It’s novel and quite nice to look at. You just have to be captured by the mechanics and the beauty to really enjoy the game. Just like being a photographer.

If you can picture Red Carpet on your game table, get your own copy directly from Devir Games, on Amazon, or ask for it at your friendly local game store.

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Devir Games provided The Family Gamers with a promotional copy of Red Carpet for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

• Who Will Enjoy It: People who love golden age of cinema; Amateur photographers
• Ages: 8+
• Number of Players: 2-4
• Play Time: 40 minutes
• Complexity: Medium-light
• Game Type: Hand Management, Line of Sight
• When It Fits: Remembering great actors and actresses of yesteryear
• Similar Games: Picture Perfect, Redwood, Tang Garden