Photoshoot

Photoshoot from Funnyfox is a team game for 4-6 players where you are competing to take the best photos of celebrities in a limited time using limited communication. But beware! Celebrities are fussy and only move in certain ways. And your opposing team is always looking for you to make a costly mistake!

[NB: There Is also a co-operative mode available for 2-3 players and an easier mode for families]

How to Play!

9 randomly drawn character cards are flipped to form a 3 x 3 grid and the 90 second hourglass is placed next to it. The photo objective deck, the orange effect deck, and the blue effect deck are shuffled (separately) and each placed close by.

Each round, one team play as photographers and the other as the control team who check for mistakes!

As photographers, your team must complete as many photo objectives as possible in the limited time. In turn, each member of the team can either swap two adjacent character cards or swap two “friends” (Olivia, Chloe and Alice) located anywhere in the grid or shout “photo!” to complete an objective. But swapping cards will trigger specific effects on the rest of the grid. Oh and you can’t speak!

Effects are either taken from the blue deck (easier) or the orange deck (harder) and get drawn at the end of the round where a certain number of points are reached by a given team. They apply only to the team who gained the points and triggered the effect draw, and they apply to each subsequent round.

As the control team, you have to keep your beady eyes on the lookout for mistakes during the effects the Photographers are triggering, whether anyone is sneaking a speak or a gesture to help their teammates, turn swapping, and when they shout “Photo”. If a mistake is suspected, the hourglass is paused, and there’s a check – if it was a valid challenge, the control team gains a camera token. If there wasn’t one, the Photographers get the token and the game resumes.

At round end, Photographers get 2 points per objective card gained and 1 point per token awarded. The control team get 1 point per token. Then teams switch roles and the board is re-set ready to go again! You can also increase the

The game ends when a team has reached 25 points!

Final Thoughts!

This is a colourful, compact team based game that isn’t your usual word-based fayre. Having a co-operative mode and ways to increase or decrease the difficulty also makes it a game that adapts to the group around your table. The characters have bold illustrations, and the wooden camera token is sweet. It also comes in an eye catching tin and is budget friendly.

We enjoy the need to think ahead and bear in mind what your next team might be able to do with any movement you make on your own turn. Likewise, working out whether to grab an objective now rather than use your turn to manoeuvre cards into positions that could gain more valuable objectives is an easy to understand dilemma. Applying multiple effects to each team as the game progresses is also a simple way to alter the difficulty in the placement and objective acquisition.

Overall, as a family, we had fun playing as Photographers. Watching for the other tea to make mistakes does feel a bit mean, although many are missed, so there’s that comfort! And some groups will really love calling each other out when they move James too far from Olivia! Limited communication sounds easy, but it is always hard to stop eye-bulging and nose twitching to give hits as to what cards to move to make the next player’s turn more successful.

Whilst there is a family mode which limits the complication of adding effects, our 9 year old also preferred the co-operative mode. Working together meant that he felt supported in his choices and knew that one of us could mitigate any sub-optimal moves. It also reinforces the need for honesty as the accuracy in co-op mode is self-regulated!

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