Red Carpet: your phone becomes a camera, and your friends become paparazzi with no scruples

Of all the boxes I brought back from Essen 2025, this is the one that threw me the most. Not the deepest, not the most ambitious, but by far the most unusual. Red Carpet, published by Devir, asks something of you that no other game on my shelf does: take out your phone, set it on a tripod at the edge of the board, and take a real photograph. Not a symbolic photo, not a card representing a photo. A photo, the one that will still be in your camera roll after the game. The first time I saw a whole table lean in to challenge a neighbour's framing, I knew I was holding something apart.

Publisher: Devir · Designers: Anna Lucini Canals, Pau Moré Gómez and Eloi Pujadas · Art: Albert Monteys · Year: 2025 · Players: 2 to 4 · Duration: 30 to 45 min · Age: 8+ · Mechanisms: hand management, moving units, end-of-game bonuses

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Hollywood, golden age, awards night

The scene is set in thirty seconds. A 1950s Hollywood awards ceremony, a red carpet, limousines spilling out their stars, and you down in the photographers' pit under orders to bring back tomorrow's front page. The components take the theme seriously all the way through: the central strip of the board is genuinely covered in imitation velvet carpet, a production choice that costs money and that you feel with your fingers as much as with your eyes. The characters are cardboard standees around ten centimetres tall, slotted into bases, so that instead of looking down at a flat board, you are looking at a scene with depth, at lens height.

Each player also gets their own tripod, moulded in plastic in their colour, marking their position as a photographer at the edge of the carpet. That is what holds the phone when the shutter goes, and seeing it planted there is enough for your opponents to guess what you are setting up. Even the limousine cards play along: you flip one each round, and it tells you which celebrities have just stepped out of the car and where they take their place. The gesture says exactly what it should say, a car pulling up and the thrill of finding out who steps out of it.

Albert Monteys's caricaturist line does the rest. The celebrities carry no official names, but you recognise the silhouettes of the era at a glance, the blonde in the white dress, the man in the trench coat with a cigarette, the round profile of the master of suspense. Beside them stands the entourage, extras drawn to be perfectly nondescript, whose only function in the game is to photobomb you forty years before the word existed.

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Five cards in hand, three ways to ruin someone's day

A game runs over five rounds, and each round follows the same rhythm. First the limousine: two celebrities and four entourage members step out, take their places at the bottom of the carpet and turn to face one of the two sides. Anyone who arrived in earlier rounds moves up the same distance towards the auditorium, which very quickly produces a traffic jam of stars and nobodies.

Then the actions, and this is where the game shows its teeth. You get five cards for the round, you play three of them as actions, discard one and keep the last for your vote. Each card can be used for three different things. You can set your tripod down on one of the ten numbered spots behind the billboards, and that spot is then reserved for you. You can vote, face down, for the celebrity pictured on the card, a vote that will only be revealed at the very end. Or you can meddle with the red carpet itself, which is the heart of the matter: spin someone a hundred and eighty degrees, call a person over so they step towards your lens, or push a whole column one space closer to the auditorium.

In other words, everybody is tinkering with the same scene at the same time. You spend your turn drawing the star you want towards you, while your neighbour spends theirs turning her back to your lens moments before the shutter. A celebrity pushed too far walks into the auditorium and leaves the game for good, which elegantly deprives someone of the shot they had been building for two rounds. It is petty, it is delicious, and it stays perfectly readable for a first-timer.

The shutter click

The round ends with the photograph, and that is the moment everyone is waiting for. You set your phone on your tripod, adjust the zoom as the rules recommend, hunt for your angle and take one shot. One only, of a celebrity you have not yet photographed.

The scoring is verifiable with the naked eye: the star has to be facing you, she is worth more when she is close and cleanly framed, her sponsor's billboard in the background earns you a bonus, and every recognisable extra's face in the shot costs you points. Ten points maximum. You show your photo to the table, it approves or it argues, you score, and round you go again.

What I appreciate here is that the phone is not a gimmick bolted onto a game that would have worked without it. No app to download, no account to create, no update that will make the box unusable in five years. You use the camera, nothing else. And at the end of the evening you walk away with a roll of botched shots and triumphant close-ups, the best game souvenir I know.

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What lands

Originality first, and I mean the word. I see a lot of new releases go by, and it is rare for a game to offer me a gesture I have never made before. This one does, and it keeps its promise all the way through.

Accessibility next. Five minutes of explanation is enough, and the theme carries the mechanisms so well that nobody has to memorise anything. Once you tell someone "you are a paparazzo, you want the star facing you and nobody in front", you are done explaining.

Interaction last. The game is far more mischievous than it looks, and that is what saves it from being a mere technical curiosity. At two, it is a calculated duel, each patiently undoing the other's framing. At three, the balance is to my mind at its best. At four, the scene changes so much between two of your turns that planning collapses, but the laughter goes up a notch.

Shooting into the light

My real reservation is about format. Red Carpet sits between two stools, and it stays there. A little too many rules and far too many components for a late-evening party game, not enough substance for a family game that would earn a lasting place on the shelf. Laying out the standees, the bases and the modular board takes a genuine setup session, which is a high price for a thirty-five minute game. This is the kind of box you bring out four or five times for the pleasure of showing it off, rather than one you write into your rotation.

A word on turn order too. Acting last in a round is a clear advantage, since you get the final say before the shutter and undo everyone else's framing once they have set it all up. Over five rounds with four players, the position does not rotate perfectly fairly, and you feel it. Nothing fatal at this level of lightness, but worth knowing before you complain. One last obvious point not to overlook: you need one phone per player, with battery to spare. With eight-year-olds, expect to be the designated photographer.

Verdict

8/10. Red Carpet is the most unusual game I brought back from Essen 2025, and that is not a token compliment: it offers a genuinely new gesture, it holds it, and it builds a real tactical game around it rather than a technical demo. You will not bring it out every week, its in-between format prevents that, but it is exactly the sort of game everyone should try once in their life. Put it in front of people who think they have seen everything, set your phone on the tripod, and watch the faces around the table. Devir took a real design risk, and the focus is sharp.