Game Theory: Y'all are playing the Box Office Game, right?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

Confession time: This week’s installment of Game Theory was supposed to be about Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess, Capcom’s oddball new hybrid of action, real-time strategy, and light base-building mechanics. It’s a genuinely neat game, full of cool interpretations of Japanese mythology and interesting ways to blend its action and strategy sides, and it’s in no way the game’s fault that we sort of blew it off to devote more time to replaying Kingdom Hearts 2 over the past weekend.

Rather than subject you to that Disney-fied symptom of our ongoing and roiling mid-life crises, though, we thought we’d tap a different part of our regular gaming routine. One that, as a bonus, will likely be of especial appeal to the sorts of folk clicking around on The A.V. Club: The Box Office Game.

Now, there’s a decent chance you’re already familiar with, and are a frequent player of, the Box Office Game; it’s been around for several years at this point. Originating from Griffin Newman and former A.V. Club writer Dave Sims’ Blank Check podcast, the game—given a web implementation a couple of years back, with a daily instance to play—is surface-level simple: You’re given a random weekend from the past, and the top five U.S. box office performances from that weekend. Your job is to guess the five movies in question, spending points from your eventual score to get different hints (including actors, directors, and taglines).

This can, depending on your personal knowledge base and familiarity with, say, the lesser works of Jeff Bridges, be incredibly difficult, especially as you dip further down the rankings. (Or, god forbid, hit a weekend from the dead zones of January or February.) But it’s fascinating how easy the game can be, sometimes, too, once you get into its rhythm: Start thinking about 2007, say, and what you were doing then, and, more importantly, what movie you were really excited to see. It’s part nostalgia exercise, part trivia rundown, and it’s recently become a satisfying part of our daily routine, playing it over breakfast. (Which is, of course, too early in the day to run through old episodes of Jeopardy!, instead). The joy of movie trivia is, at least in part, a reaction to how utterly trivial it is. Unless you’re one of the protagonists of Scream ($6 million opening, December 20, 1996) nothing bad has ever happened to anyone because they didn’t know what the highest box office performer of 1994 was. (It’s The Lion King; you probably knew that.) It is, in fact, a safe storage space for an absolutely ludicrous amount of attention, and if you’re like us, that can be a godsend at times.

There are other great daily movie games out there—we encourage you to list them in the comments, because we’re always on the lookout for more. The rise of Wordle has been a genuine boon for a steady influx of meaningless challenge in our daily routines. But, if we’re being honest, we’re pretty partial to the Box Office Game: Where else can our detailed knowledge of which Marvel movies came out which year be of genuine use to anyone?