A mad bomber has planted a device in the building and you have to put together a team of experts to find the bomb and dismantle it. Do you call the bomb squad? A SWAT team? No, you call Gene Simmons, Mr T, and Albert Einstein.
Famous Missions by Jason Tagmire is a new card game where you must put together ridiculous celebrity trios to complete movie-plot style missions like stopping alien invasions, robbing banks, etc. The included celebrities range from Bill Gates to Genghis Kahn to Paris Hilton. The cartoonish artwork is fantastic makes you want to play it.
Game mechanics are as follows. ?The judge player draws a Mission Card from the deck and the other two players pick their three best People Cards out of seven for that mission. ?The judge chooses the best team out of the two and the loser can then argue his case for why his team should have won. ?If the judge has been swayed and changes their mind, the other player can then argue why his team is superior and the judge gets one more chance to change her mind. ?Whoever the judge finalizes on wins the round and the game progresses to a new mission. ? ?It’s very similar to Apples to Apples, another great game.
Here’s a video the creator, Jason Tagmire, put together to show how it goes.
Overall I love the concept and the artwork, but I feel like the game mechanics need some more work. I know there is a great game buried inside of Famous Missions waiting to get out, but in the current form it’s hard to keep playing. I think you get desensitized to the overall joke and you need a way to keep it interesting. I’ve come up with a few and they definitely enhanced gameplay in my sessions (I’ve played it three times now).
Rule Variations:
1. The standard rules have one player always acting as the judge. We took turns, because no one wanted to play the judge every time.
2. The judge hid his eyes when players were choosing their teams so he didn’t know who chose them. This helps reduce bias.
3. Instead of flipping over three from one team and then three from another, we alternated back and forth flipping over one from each team at a time. This encouraged comparisons between those two celebrities and made it more dramatic.
One of the hardest things about new games is getting people to try them. As soon as I show people the cards to Famous Missions they say, “We have to play this!” It’s an awesome game that just needs a little help and I love showing it to people. If you want a copy, buy it online here.