Base price: ¥2,750.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?) (as Photograph)
Logged plays: 7
One of my friends got really into Saashi & Saashi games, in case you’re wondering why they’re suddenly spiking in my review queue. That’s what she wants to play, and since she agrees to play board games with me as I need for my reviews, we play what she wants to play (with some exceptions, sorry). This was one I had been waiting to show her for when we had a few more players, and it was a huge hit. It also inspired me to finally sit down and review it, so here we are. I’m excited to talk about it, so let’s get right to it!
In Wind the Film, players have the enviable plan for the day of walking around town with a half-size wind-up camera to take pictures. It’s a beautiful day in 1960s Japan, so you might as well make the most of it before sunset. The challenge is organizing everything into filmstrips so you can let the photos tell the story you want to tell. A good photographer doesn’t always interject their perspective; sometimes the situation itself tells its story better than you ever could. So wind up and cut loose to take the best photos. Will you be able to make some memories?
Contents
Setup
Not much here. You’ll want to use 5 / 6 / 7 colors of cards with 2 / 3 / 4 players, but otherwise shuffle those cards up:
Split them into six equal-sized decks and shuffle the Sunset Card into one of the piles.
Take that pile and place it on top of one of the other piles, and then place the remaining four piles on top of those two. Then, set up the play area. At three or four players, you’re going to have four columns and four rows of cards. At two players, four columns and three rows of cards. The first column is face-up, the second and third are face-down, and the fourth is face-up. Draw five cards each, setting them in your hand so that the right-most card is in front. Set the Good Shot cards aside on the correct side for your player count, and you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Wind the Film is all about photography! My jam. Your goal is to capture the life and times of a town as you travel around, taking better shots with your little camera. The challenge is how you get those photos and how you organize them.
Each turn, you’ll take between one and three cards from the play area and add them to the front of your hand one at a time. You draw in a very specific way: you always pull cards from the left side or the right side, and you declare how many you’re grabbing before you do. (You can’t swap sides mid-take.) Once you’ve taken your cards and added them to your hand (like in setup, so the rightmost card remains in front), you wind the film! This means you can take any card from your hand and move it as many spaces as you want to the right. Note that this is not optional; you must move a card.
After winding, you must play the same number of cards that you drew! The first card of a color can be played without incident, but all subsequent cards must be between 1 and 3 higher or lower than the previous card. Once you’ve played your second card, you also lock that sequence of cards in ascending or descending order. You cannot switch once you’ve started. If you cannot play a card legally, you must show it and then place it face-down. Any number may be played after a face-down card, provided it follows the ascending or descending order.
If you’ve played three or four cards of a color and nobody has claimed that color’s Good Shot! card yet, you can claim it! Place it near your shots and you’ll get bonus points at the end of the game. Eventually, there will be three or fewer cards in the play area. When that happens, the play area must be refilled at the end of a player’s turn. Slide the remaining cards into the first column (revealing them if they’re face-down) and then refill the cards in the same face-up, face-down pattern as setup. If the Sunset Card is revealed, the Sunset Phase immediately occurs.
During the Sunset Phase, each player must wind a card immediately and then play two cards. All players now have a hand size of three for the rest of the game. Similarly, when the play area needs to be refilled but cannot be, the game ends. Each player again winds a card and plays two, leaving them with one final card.
Total scores by following the indicated value for each color, keeping in mind that face-down cards are worth -2 each. The player with the most points wins! For an additional challenge, you can try the Missing Shot variant: the card left in each player’s hand reduces (or increases) the score of that color to 0. Good luck!
Player Count Differences
This one’s largely got the same vibe regardless of player count. With more players, you have more fighting over certain cards, but the threshold for a Good Shot bonus is lower and there are more colors. It makes it hard to pull off certain useful combos, but it makes them more satisfying and very lucrative when you can. Nonetheless, at any player count it’s going to be a tough game. It’s a great challenge and still very fun at two or more players. No strong preference, just be ready to put in a bit of work to succeed.
Strategy
- Three-card moves are very tough to pull off, but highly valuable if you can. If you play them all well, you can really get a bunch of points, especially if the cards are tightly clustered (meaning you can play even more cards of the same color later). You just run the risk of drawing cards that don’t work for you and being unable to play them.
- Keep track of the cards you see! You need to know the odds of getting the card you want when you draw and the odds of getting a card you can’t use. I mean, you don’t need to know them necessarily but it’s significantly more helpful if you do.
- Don’t wait on certain cards for too long. If you do, another player is liable to snatch them up! Once another player has a card you need, it’s not coming back. You can also tell if you’re goofed because the three cards you could play might be in other players’ filmstrips. If that’s the case, you’re either stuck or looking at a penalty.
- Playing a card face-down isn’t terrible. Sometimes it’s worth losing some points in order to be able to continue a filmstrip of a certain color. You can often score a lot more points than you’d otherwise have lost.
- It’s sometimes worth it to take a penalty if you can snatch a Good Shot before another player plays it. This is pretty key, since a penalty is -2 and a Good Shot is +5. Keep track of your points to some degree while you play.
- Do not go for a Good Shot during the Sunset Phase. It not only doesn’t count, but you also lose the opportunity to get a Good Shot of that color later in the game. Doubly bad.
- If you’re playing with the Missed Shot variant, be very careful about what card you keep at the end. You don’t want to negate an entire run where you got 10+ points, for instance. You can try to shoot the moon and go for a color where you have lots of negative values, but that’s much easier said than done.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Love the art in this game. It’s not only pleasant and charming but it also references other Saashi & Saashi games! I think that’s very fun.
- I also really like the Filmstrip of Sorrow / Missed Shot variant. It makes the game a lot harder, but I appreciate the description in the rulebook of a shot that would have been so perfect that it makes the entire set of shots feel worthless. I like that there’s some torment inherent to the art.
- Just a very satisfying and challenging card game. I’ve always come back to this again and again, and I think it’s just one of my favorite small card games. The flow of drawing cards is interesting, the shifting of cards in your hand is challenging and thought-provoking, and nailing a big combo for points feels great. It makes you feel smart and lets you follow-through on plans in a satisfying way. It’s par for the course for a Saashi & Saashi, but it’s still worth mentioning.
- I really like the way you draw cards. Drawing from the front and playing from the back is cool, but I particularly like that you have to pull from the left or the right. It means you’re usually pulling some cards based on vibe (or the numbers visible on the back) and balancing probability against hope is always a fun time in a game.
- “Winding” a card in your hand is a lot of fun and pretty interesting strategically, too. It matters a lot which card you wind and when, as that can be used to reverse a sequence or stall until you can set up the card you need to play. Plus, you can never wind back, so you have to be smart about which cards you take (and how many).
- Very portable. A very small box game; used to go everywhere with me (as you might be able to tell from the box photo).
- A surprisingly easy game to pick up. Once you learn how to draw, wind, and play cards, you’re pretty much set. Scoring is pretty easy, too.
Mehs
- This is one of those games that can just abruptly end, so once the Sunset Phase happens, be prepped! You maybe have one or two redraws. Sometimes that really takes the wind out of your sails if you had a certain plan. I haven’t felt the pain of it too much, but I have been surprised before.
Cons
- There’s a tiny bit of luck inherent to the game, but sometimes you have to risk it if you want to swing big. You can have an abysmal starting hand, sometimes, or you can just have bad luck with face-down cards. Neither feels good, but they’re not exactly uncommon.
Overall: 9.25 / 10
Overall, I think Wind the Film is one of my favorite Saashi & Saashi games! I probably slightly prefer Remember our Trip from a gameplay standpoint, but I gotta give Wind the Film props for its simple, clever gameplay and its high portability. It’s the game I play the most out of their catalogue, and that’s got to count for something. I think Wind the Film is an almost Platonic Ideal of an elegant game. It’s got a unique style, an interesting mechanic, and it comes together seamlessly with simple scoring and risky gameplay to let players feel like they’re taking control of their own plans. That’s pretty cool. It helps, as always, that Saashi & Saashi is one of the hardest-working publishing houses in the business and has a very consistently high-quality brand, but there’s also something to the theme. It’s peaceful and meditative even as players are getting a bit stressed by the challenge, and there’s something introspective and balancing about the art. It’s a peaceful game even as it causes me personally emotional turmoil, and I love Wind the Film for that. It’s a game I’m going to play again and again, and so it gets high marks from me. If you love photography, you’re interested in excellent games from a fantastic publisher, or you just saw that one card with a picture of a clown and now you’re curious, I’d highly recommend trying out Wind the Film! It’s an excellent game.
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