Red Light: A Star is Porn

I brought it along expecting a joke: striking art, a theme with no interest in being polite, and not much else. Instead, it became a runaway hit. There is a proper game under the glossy, shameless wrapper, which is more than I had bargained for.

At heart, it is doing familiar Munchkin business: inspect someone’s hand, steal a card, spoil their plan. Only you do not say, “I look at your hand and steal a card.” You announce that you are playing a “double rear punch” on them. The interaction is direct, silly and just nasty enough to get the table going.

The useful thing is that the noise does not merely circle the drain forever. There is a beginning, middle and end here, perhaps more reliably than in Munchkin, so the group is not just firing lines across a deck of cards. It is better with two or three players; at four or five, the same chaos takes longer than it earns. Who is meant to preserve their dignity then?

This is not a game to write home about. It is, however, an honest little argument in a box: play it two or three times with the same friends and you will have a good time. And hearing that the game it re-implements, Squillo, is an even worse thematic sewer has frankly made me want to find it.