Every year at Christmas my friends and I try to find the most corny Christmas movies we can find. Typically these are from Hallmark, though in recent years a few Netflix films have snuck into the mix. While there’s a formula, it’s actually very hard to write one of those films. How does a business survive selling Christmas Hats year-round from a brick-and-mortar store? Is that lady going to date a snowman? As much as we make fun, we’re back each year watching them.
One year we even challenged each other to invent our own fake Hallmark films. We then wrote sample scenes and had a friend judge. Sadly despite our best intentions “the annual” Hallmarkathon, has only happened once.
I explained this tradition to another set of friends at my local board game club. As soon as I described the idea people started inventing their own Hallmark movie plots.
This is fun, I thought. If only I could distil this into a mini Hallmarkathon. After some messing around I struck upon the idea of a set of cards. Drawing heavily from games like FUNemployed and Braggart, Pitching Perfect was born.
Players are given a hand with character cards, a location and a plot point and play the role of “screenwriters”. They then pitch this to another player who acts as the executive for that round. The executive can also play cards from their own deck that force the screenwriter to modify their pitch.
The game requires three + players, though I also included suggestions to use the card for a solo Hallmarkathon script challenge.
The game is available as a free print and play on Itch.io or virtually as a Tabletop simulator mod.
I wouldn’t have been able to make this game without Dextrious. It’s a great tool that lets me design cards, and generate their contents from a spreadsheet. I was also able to export to Tabletop Simulator Directly.
Itch – https://href.li/?https://rebeccamwrites.itch.io/pitching-perfect
Tabletop Simulator – https://href.li/?https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3386613192
