Road To Hollywood: The Movie-Making Board Game Is Your Next Great Tabletop Adventure

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Ever feel like the stories you create with your tabletop group could make for a pretty good movie? Now's the time to put that theory to the test. For more than a decade, the team at Filmevent has used filmmaking as a way to help organizations develop more collaborative ways to work together. Now they are bringing that experience into your home with their Kickstarter for "Road To Hollywood," a filmmaking tabletop game designed to turn your friends and family members into the Hollywood headliners they were always meant to be.

Like many current generation tabletop titles, the Mafia Edition of "Road To Hollywood" — the first release by the publisher that puts players through the paces of shooting their own mafia movie — is an app-assisted game. Your group of 6-10 players divide up the responsibilities of making a movie between you and follow the creative briefs to shoot your short film using Filmevent's custom app. The result of your game night is a short film that can be shared with friends and family across the world.

To shoot your film, leverage both the shotlist — 43 cards that include both storyboards and dialogue — with the cast cards. There are six required roles in the Mafia Edition of "Road To Hollywood," but there are also four extra players that can be "written into" the story with optional dialogue options. From here, players will record each of the scenes into the app directly. Once the shoot is done, the app will serve as your Thelma Schoonmaker, editing together your footage and adding music in all the right places to transform your party experience into a genuine short film.

While some players will jump at the chance to be on camera, "Road To Hollywood" also offers a handful of behind-the-scenes responsibilities to people who may be less comfortable with being recorded. This also reinforces the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Directors and actors often get all the love, but each successful film is the result of hundreds of talented people handling a variety of (sometimes thankless) tasks. Catering only seems simple until your partner, the star, starts to get a little hangry.

The fun doesn't stop with the first video: once you've finished your first video, encourage your players to take on different roles or crew responsibilities (or both) to extend the game's replay factor. You can recreate the pressures of a shooting schedule by setting a production timer, and If you really want to bring Hollywood to your living room, hold your very own film festival and have your friends and family vote on their favorite adaptations. The Kickstarter even promises new versions of the game in the future, too, with both a Western Edition and a Zombie Edition both coming soon.

And while the game is absolutely designed for non-professionals, if you're already in the industry, "Road To Hollywood" can be a great way to make your work a little more accessible to those who don't understand what you do. Grandma may not know how to open the YouTube app on her television to watch your latest clips, but put her in charge of location scouting and in five minutes she might just have stronger opinions on natural light than you do.

In the end, it's important to remember that "Road To Hollywood" is a party game first and foremost. The stakes are too low for your film to be the victim of creative differences; keep things simple, let people tap into their creative selves, and toast the final product when the film is finished. The goal is to put something on the table that gets everyone involved. Let your friends and family tap into that joy of creation — for an evening, the dream of independent cinema is alive and well at your kitchen table.