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Written reviews matter. The excellent Zatu contributor Nick Welford wrote such a compelling review for Picture Perfect I had to own it. He wasn’t wrong, the base game is amazing and provides a great time and lots of laughs whenever it is played. But what if you want to shake things up a bit? Luckily Arcane Wonders have released two expansions (as well as the five to six player expansion) and this is my review for ‘The Picture Perfect Movie Star expansion’.
Who’s That Girl
So, what do you get in this expansion? Quite a lot is the short answer but if you want more details let me ‘put you in the picture’.
You get three new characters (with envelopes) to mix into your base game with enough of each for up to six players. All of them are famous movie stars from back in the golden age of silent movies and they look fantastic mixed into the crowd. In addition there are twelve new preference cards, six new exchange cards and three new auctions cards.
Face Time
The new preference cards really shake things up with two new mechanisms added to the game.
I want to speak with a man / woman now adds the direction that character is facing as a consideration. To gain points for this card, the character that has this preference has to be facing a man / woman. The envelope for all the characters have a black dot on either the top, bottom, left or right and that indicates the direction they are looking.
The Plant remains an unusual character as it is neither a man or woman and it is facing all directions. The character that is being looked at doesn't have to be looking back which is hilarious as it sometimes looks like the other person really doesn’t want to be next to them or talking to them and we have all experienced that at parties.
I want a picture of me with “this star” requires that both the characters faces are completely shown (not covered up) and the characters face with this preference is the closest to the stars face when compared to everyone else. If playing with ultra serious gamers this new preference could lead to arguments and tape measures coming out but if taken as a bit of fun it should be really easy to add these new rules to the game.
The new exchange and auction cards are great and help with the variety between plays. A special mention to the gossip exchange card. This one allows your competitors to discuss which one of your envelopes they would like to see just one preference card out of. You then shuffle the three cards and show one of them at random to the other players.
Strike A Pose
With all of this new content does come a bit more set up time in-between plays. You need to randomly remove three of the original characters from the game together with their envelopes and any card specific to them. You will then need to remove more preference cards from the original game so that twelve cards in total have been removed. Then add the twelve new preference cards, shuffle up and fill the envelopes.
If you ever want to change which characters are removed from the game you will also need to make sure any cards specific to them are also removed and replaced with cards specific to the characters re-added to the game.
Final Thoughts
The Picture Perfect Movie Star expansion is amazing, it does exactly what an expansion should do which is to add more of what you already like plus add a little more without changing the core concept. I love the new standees and preference cards and the fact that it includes new exchange and auction cards gives more variety between plays.
I am really struggling to find anything negative to say about this expansion so I wont. If you like the game then get this, if you haven’t yet tried the base game get it now and you might as well get this expansion at the same time.
