These pictures of you
Over the course of my life I have seen a huge shift in the way society values a photo. From my father’s holiday snaps and slide shows to getting my own camera, the switch to digtial, and then having a camera on me every day. We have thousands of photos in digital caches, taking them almost as an afterthough to a moment. The technology of photography has a colourful history, but one piece I had never come across is the half-cell camera. These are film cameras that only expose half a cell for each photo so if you have a 36 cells you will get 72 photos. This is the piece of technology that is at the heart of a seemingly charming card game called Photograph.
Photograph is designed by Saashi Takaro with art from Takashi Takaro. They are a husband and wife team with their own imprint Saashi and Saashi. The western edition of the game is published by Matagot. The original title for the game was Wind the Film.
I first played Photograph at Airecon 2024. It was late on in the evening and I felt like the game was making me lose my mind. In a good way. Some games have emergent frustration. A feature of their systems just rubs you the wrong way. Others have frustration baked in. It’s deliberate, tuned, and causes you to tear your hair out. Photograph falls into this latter category.
At Photograph’s core is a hand management puzzle, but before we get to it you need to know a bit about the cards. Every card is of a coloured suit, and numbered from 1-12. You being with 5 of these in hand. A number are laid out in ‘The Field’ some face up, others face down. The back of each card reveals the suit it belongs to and the likely number on the front of the card: 1-6 or 7-12.
The aim of the game is to play cards in sequence in front of you. Cards can be up to 3 apart and the sequence can ascend or descend, but can’t fluctuate: it must only ascend or descend. You can also build these sequences over multiple turns. So for instance you might play and 12 and 9 blue on one turn, then add to it with 7,6, and 3 on another. At the end of the game the longer the sequence of cards you have played, the more points it is worth. Each suit can only have one sequence in front of you.
That sounds simple enough but as the philosopher Berneard Suits put it ‘a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unecessary obstacles’. The obstacles that Photograph throws in your way are two-fold: your hand of cards can only be manipulated one way and you can only gain cards in another way.
On your turn you must pick up 1-3 cards from the Field. This being Photograph, you can’t just take them however you want. You have to pick them up from one of the rows, taking some face-up and some face-down depending on your choices. Of course the face-down ones you have some idea of what they are going to be, but that doesn’t mean the gods will always smile on you.
When you do gain cards they go at the front of your hand. If you fan 5 cards the front is the card you can fully see the face of. They go there one at a time in the same order you picked them up in.
Now you get a chance to ‘Wind the Film’. You must move one card from anywhere in your hand, apart from the very front, at least one position forward. A small chance to rearrange your cards and prepare for what is coming next.
Then you ‘Take the Shot’ forcing you to play the same number of cards from the back of your hand that you added to the front. Keep in mind that each card must be played in sequence, no more than 3 apart. Of course the longer the sequence of cards at the end the more points you get. The game wants you to put yourself in difficult circumstances by trying to make your turns as efficient as possible. Of course not everything goes to plan.
Sometimes you have to play a card out of sequence and this becomes a missed shot, costing you points at the end of the game. However there is a silver lining. The next card you play into that suit doesn’t have to be within 3 of the most recent face-up card. You still have to ascend or descend as the sequence dictates, but you get a little bit of leeway. Oh, one more thing. The points you get for the length of each sequence, only face-up cards count.
Photograph is one of those small card games that is simple to grasp when you get to it, but harder to explain. It’s fixed hand and very specific method of pick and play are at the crux of the puzzle. Each turn is agonising. The frustration and friction are a feature, not a bug. Its incredibly hard to manipulate your hand correctly. How about doing it with just 3 cards instead of 5?
As cards are picked up the Field empties, it eventually gets refreshed. As the deck dwindles a sunset card gets pulled. Everyone has to instantly ‘wind the film’ then play two cards from the back of their hand as with ‘take the shot’. You have to play the rest of the game with only 3 cards in hand at the end of any turn. The puzzle becomes tighter. When the Field drains for the last time you wind and shoot one more time, leaving only a single card in hand. If you play with the advanced rules, that I have never dared, the suit of this final card scores no points for you.
Photograph looks like a charming little card game, and in some ways it is. The art and graphic design is excellent. Each suit does tell its own little story of the pictures a person has taken. Beyond that charm lies a fiendish and constantly evolving puzzle, with a simple mechanical core. It means that you spend the time fretting over your choices, not rememebering the rules.
Many of the games from this design house have a charming exterior and fiendish, chewy centre. You can really get your teeth into these games, but they don’t oustay their welcome. They will possess your mind, and make it turn inside out while you play them, then leave that lingering doubt that you could have done better. Like staring at a photograph of a moment you can’t fully recall.
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