Have you ever heard of “Movie Tag”? Probably not. It is a game I made up when the Covid pandemic hit the USA back in early 2020.
You see, I am a big movie fan and I have a large movie collection with roughly 2000 DVDs amd Blurays and over 3000 in the cloud. I knew that my wife and I would need to quarantine because of existing health issues. To me, watching movies was an obvious and enjoyable way to pass the time, so I set about crafting a set of rules that would define our journey through the cinema.
Here are the short and simple rules for Movie Tag:
- Start by picking a movie… any movie.
- The next movie is picked by following an actor from the first movie into another movie they appeared in, thus “tagging” into the next movie. The actor doesn’t have to be on-screen, they could be a narrator, for instance, but they must have a role and not just be mentioned.
- You can tag with the same actor more than once but not into and out of the same movie.
- You cannot watch the same movie twice during a game of Movie Tag.
- A game of Movie Tag ends when you can’t follow anyone out of a movie without violating the above rules or at some other boundary you set. I typically end my Movie Tag games with the end of the year. If you make it to your predefined stopping point, you win! If not, you lose, but at least you were entertained along the way.
There are opportunities for variations, of course. You could allow tagging directors or producers. You could stay within a certain genre. You could include TV shows. Tailor it to your likes and dislikes. I like to add challenges within a game such as tagging into older movies. I successfully tagged in and out of the 1930 movie “Little Ceasar” with Edward G Robinson in one of my tag games. The sky is the limit.
Most games have some sort of scoring mechanism to determine who wins. While I don’t typically keep score, there is a simple scoring mechanism that is rather obvious… 1 point for each movie watched. You can enhance scoring by rewarding challenges. In the example I gave above, I could add a multiplier for the age of the movie, maybe for each 20 years, or part there of. So, “Little Ceasar” was 91 years old at the time I watched it making it worth 5 points instead of 1.
That’s it. I hope you have fun with movie tag as I have.