Picture Perfect

Designed by Anthony Nouveau and published by Arcane Wonders and Corax Games, Picture Perfect offers an ingenious twist on deduction and puzzle optimisation games. The premise is simple: the 2-4 players (or 2-6 if you add the 5/6-player expansion) are society photographers setting up to take the Perfect Picture. The problem is that all the participants have their own idiosyncratic preferences of where they want to be situated and who they do or don't want positioned near them.

For each of this game's 14 characters (which includes the dog and the potted plant) there'll be three cards concealed in an envelope. These specify that character's particular requirements, and it's possible some may even be mutually exclusive: a character may have a card that inists they are at the edge of the picture and another card that demands they are in a central position. We guess it may be theoretically possible for every character's desires to be fully met but the likelihood is that one character's preferences will conflict with those of another character, so players will have to work out how best to optimise the standees for the tableau that will become their photo. You need to remember what you know about each character and, to cap it all, players are each working with incomplete information: you each start off with some envelopes and you expand your knowledge by trading with others or by auctioning information.

And as a satisfying denouement, players are encouraged to use their smartphones to take an actual photo of their finished tableau and use that to work out the scores at the end of the game.

With art from Ronny Libor, Sören Meding, Gyula Pozsgay and Maja Wrzosekhe, the standees in the core game look as tho' they hail from the Edwardian period (early 20th Century). In addition to the 5/6 player expansion, there are some further fun expansions that broadly tie in with this period setting. Each comes with sufficient components for the fully expanded six-player game, and for each there are new standees that are substituted for a random selection of those in the original game. This can be a bit fiddly to set up because it doesn't just mean taking out some specific standees but also all the preferences cards that refer to the characters you are taking out.

Anthony Nouveau's Movie Star expansion introduces some of the stars of the Silent era: Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy (a 'paired' standee with its own special requirements) and an actress who is portrayed with her back to the audience. The expansion also introduces some new preferences that require characters to be facing towards each other. There are also preference cards specifying that the character wants to have their face closest to the movie star in the final photo. This latter criteria can be quite a tight calculation, so the position from which you take your actual photo could well affect whether or not you score for it.

In the Pickpocket expansion, designed by Rico Besteher and Frank Noack, you're introducing three thieves into the mix. There are a couple of different ways of using this expansion but the upshot is that valuables will be hidden among other characters and you'll score points for your thieves if they are next to a character with a valuable and have their face completely obscured in the photograph... Picture Perfect already has quite a challenging memory element but the Pickpocket expansion steps that up another notch, particularly as you don't place out your pickpocket standees until all the other standees are already in position.

With the Sherlock expansion, Anthony Nouveau adds a further game within a game. You aren't just introducing three new characters (standees for Holmes, Watson and Irene Adler) you're also trying to solve a murder. This expansion introduces alibi cards to go alongside the ordinary preferences. The idea is that when you see an alibi card you can eliminate that character as a suspect. You want then to position Holmes and Watson in the photo so that they are adjacent to the murderer... You can also score points tho' for helping the murderer to escape...

Picture Perfect is a game we return to time and again. We've enjoyed the core game and we've enjoyed playing each of the expansions; indeed, you can even play with all the expansions combined! And players are all playing simultaneously so there are no 'turns', which means that even adding the 5/6 player expansion and upping the player count to six doesn't greatly increase the playing time above that of a two- or three-player game; just expect to take longer working out the final scoring.

#PicturePerfect #ArcaneWonders #CoraxGames #deduction #memory #puzzleoptimisation #MovieStar #Sherlock #Pickpocket #alibis #photograph #societyphoto #Holmes #Watson #CharlieChaplin #LaurelandHardy