Gamemaster is a 2002 Amazon Prime documentary about modern board games… not your Monopolies and Clues but more your Settlers of Catans, Pandemics, or Cones of Dunshires. More advanced, more complex, more adult-skewing games that have exploded since, as the doc suggests, 1995 when Catan was released.
It’s a good documentary. It covers a lot of bases, sometimes a little too quickly or broadly, but it covers them decently well. From concepts, design, prototypes, documentation, Kickstarter, publishers, economics, representation, trade shows, and Spiel de Jahres. It has a lot of interviews with some of the hot shots of design like Reiner Knizia and Matt Leacock but also up-and-coming/recently funded designers of games such as Rayguns and Rocketships, Exploding Kittens, Matchmaker, Trekking the National Parks, and Thug Life.
It’s a good doc. Probably the most most conclusive or expansive doc on the subject and perhaps expert gamers will not learn much. As somewhat of a novice on the topic, I found a lot of it fairly interesting. If you have no idea what a Catan is from a Carcassone, you’ll probably get more out of it.
Score: 84