For the past two decades Scene It? has been an ever-present mainstream boardgame. It's appeared in more iterations and with more thematic tie-ins than any game bar Monopoly, and copies perenially haunt charity and thrift shops. Scene It? is essentially a simple roll & move game twinned with a trivia game, albeit that the trivia is tied to a specific theme which may be as narrow as Harry Potter or as broad, in this case, as 'the movies'. Just like Trivial Pursuit (Hasbro), Scene It? games use question cards but the USP is that the conventional question cards are supplemented with questions prompted by video clips. Earlier iterations of Scene It? incorporated an accompanying DVD but the movie clips in this edition from Imagination Games are supplied via an accompanying app.
You'll need an internet connection and there's a bit of set up before you can play. Once you've downloaded the app, you need to enter the access code that's provided inside the box. After that you should be up and running.
The game itself is played on a fold-out board, tho' there's the option of collapsing the board into a circle for a shorter game. Movie Scene It? takes 2-4 players, each of whom takes a metallic movie-related pawn (cine camera, film reel, clapperboard or box of popcorn). On your turn you roll two chunky dice: a conventional six-sided die and a custom eight-sided die. The d8 determines the category of question (ie: one of the categories on the cards or a category requiring a movie clip) and the d6 shows how far you'll move if you get the answer right. You carry on answering and moving until you get an answer wrong, so the game could be a bit dull for others if one player is a know-it-all movie buff. You can up the difficulty tho' by shortening in the app the time allowed for answers: the default is 30 seconds but you can take it all the way down to 10 seconds. One of the video clip options offers an open question for which other players can jump in; if another player jumps in with the correct answer on one of those, your turn ends.
Quiz and trivia games are only ever as good as the bank of questions. It's hard to fault Movie Scene It? on that score. There's a substantial deck of cards, each with multiple categories and questions (and all with the answers on the reverse), and the range of clips generated through the app is impressive. A question is always 'easy' when you know the answer but most folk will find this a pretty challenging trivia fest. You'll likely be running the app on your 'phone, and you can play the game using just a phone or tablet, but for best effect you should screencast the display to a smart TV or projector - especially with four players.
Having previously scorned the battered old copies of Scene It? cluttering the shelves of our local charity shops, Movie Scene It? has forced us to re-evaluate our prejudices. It may use only a bog-standard roll & move mechanic at its core but we have to admit that it's given us a lot of fun playing it - thanks mostly to the app. Movie Scene It? is unlikely to make many appearances on a regular games night but it's definitely earned its place as a game for family occasions.