/pic1580468.jpg)
/pic1356616.jpg)
As for The Big Movie, in a French-language interview on Toys Don't Cry, Faidutti explains that the game was inspired by James Ernest's The Big Idea, with players being constrained by cards in play and freed by their imagination to create screenplays. While the game was originally titled La Soirée des Oscars – roughly, Night at the Oscars – once Funforge signed on as publisher, the title understandably changed to The Big Movie in order to be paired with Funforge's 2011 overhaul and rerelease of The Big Idea.
And Faidutti ends his blog post with this promise of future delights:
Quote:
More important, I'll bring a dozen prototypes still looking for a publisher, games of my own or games I codesigned with some friend, Nathalie, Sandra, Anja, Serge or the other Bruno. I'll have a box with a mummy velociraptor and her kids, a box with laughing bisons and sneezy pandas, a box with jugglers and minstrels, two boxes with mice, tigers and elephants, a box with Lance Armstrong, Dominique Strauss Kahn and Patti Smith, a box with fake boobs and Australian frogs, a box with amphoraes, a box with paintings, a box with a modular space station, and some more.
• Meanwhile, in a Facebook post, designer Bruno Cathala showed off an advance copy of SOS Titanic, co-designed with Ludovic Maublanc. This cooperative game can be played with from one to five players, with each player being one of the crew members on that doomed voyage across the North Atlantic. You must all use the lifeboat capacity and your time as well as you can to save the most passengers possible. French publisher Ludonaute plans to release the game in September 2013 (and shows off sample illustrations on its website), but teams of four players can compete against one another at Cannes, with the highest-scoring team taking home an autographed copy of the prototype.
/pic1114682.jpg)
• Ystari Games will also have a prototype of William Attia's Spyrium on hand in Cannes, so expect to hear more about that game as soon as people can make their way to a computer from the game table.
• Finally (for now), Funforge will be showing two other prototype games, one of those being The Phantom Society by designers Hervé Marly and Frédéric Colombier with artwork by Naïade and Vincent Dutrait. The gist of the game, as best as I can determine, is that four tax inspectors who were staying as guests in a Scottish hotel turned up dead – apparently from a suicide pact – the morning before they were going to deliver a tax adjustment of £45,000 against the hotel. Some coincidence, hmm? Now these inspectors return to the hotel annually as ghosts in order to ransack the hotel to the tune of £45,000. The hotel, however, has hired a team of ghost hunters to neutralize these spirits and prevent them from causing damage. Whether the players are the ghosts, the ghost hunters, or some combination of both is unclear to me at this time, but I'm looking forward to learning more about this oddball.
Funforge will also show off a Ludovic Maublanc title called Hop Là, illustrated by Marie Cardouat, in which players want to ride balloons high into the sky, hopping through the air to catch as many clouds as possible while avoiding traps set by opponents. (I ran into Marie and Funforge's Philippe Nouhra at NY Toy Fair, but didn't ask him about demoing games as I was headed to an appointment. My loss, and yours too, alas...)
/pic1573509.jpg)
/pic1161449.jpg)
/pic1538344.jpg)
:strip_icc()/pic1573016.jpg)
