Now playing: the world of ‘Gamemaster’
As far as improbable tales of overnight success are concerned, it’s not easy to beat the example of Exploding Kittens. When its designers first put the popular card game on Kickstarter in 2015, the project reached its goal within 20 minutes and went on to break all sorts of records for crowdfunding.
But in the world of tabletop gaming, just as in any other field, such success stories are rare almost by definition. For every inventor holding a winning lottery ticket, there are hundreds more pursuing a dream, tinkering endlessly with their prototypes and hoping to follow Elan Lee, one of the auteurs behind Exploding Kittens, into the winners’ circle.
“Gamemaster” — an appealing, shambling new documentary by director Charles Mruz that debuts Tuesday, July 7 — introduces us to an array of those aspiring game designers, along with Lee and others who have reached the pinnacle of the insular world of tabletop gaming. It also serves as an introductory guide to that landscape itself, especially for viewers who are apt to say to themselves, as one of the film’s central characters did as a child, “Game inventor? I didn’t know that was a job!”
We spend time with Scott Rogers, whose Rayguns and Rocketships is an attempt to recreate the world of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and other vintage space operas — or, in his own memorable phrase, to build his own damn “Star Wars.”
We encounter Nashra Balagamwala, a young Pakistani woman of obvious energy and resourcefulness, who transmutes her fear of an arranged marriage into a darkly comic card game, Arranged!, in which a player
wins by thwarting the plans of various meddling “aunties.”
Perhaps most compelling is the story of Jason Serrato, who feels he was saved from the perils of Southern California street life by playing Dungeons and Dragons in the local public library. His game, Thug Life, is — depending on your perspective — an exercise in racial and gang stereotypes or an attempt to reflect in game form the actual world he knew as a kid.
From that point, “Gamemaster” expands its focus to touch on issues of race and representation — an enduringly worrisome concern in a world overwhelmingly dominated by white men — and from there to other aspects of the board game industry.
Mruz takes a long journey into the two conventions that anchor the board gamers’ year: Gen Con in Indianapolis and its even larger international cousin Spiel in Essen, Germany. He walks the viewer through the annual competition for Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year), which one commentator likens to the Oscars of board games, as designers hope for an accolade that can multiply their sales overnight.
And “Gamemaster” includes a variety of cameos by such celebrity designers as Reiner Knizia, the whimsical and insanely prolific designer of more than 600 games of all types and sizes; Petaluma’s Susan McKinley Ross, whose Qwirkle is a perennial crowdpleaser for players of all ages; and Klaus Teuber, the genial force behind the phenomenon that is Settlers of Catan.
Not all of these pieces mesh entirely smoothly. Mruz shows a willingness to let some of his more garrulous talking heads become repetitive, and if you’re hoping for any granular detail about the workings of these games — how do you actually play Rayguns and Rocketships, anyway? — you may be mildly disappointed.
But in their general outlines, the stories here are timeless and often inspirational. They’re tales of creators working out their dreams in stubborn, inspired isolation, hoping the results will bring pleasure to people outside their own circle. And who knows, one of them might end up being right.