Blame the Game

Jan (Dennis Mojen) cycles around for exercise, he suddenly realizes that his pet dog, Eddi, has established a bit of an excessive bond with another dog. As he tries to get Eddi to stop the act, a woman about the same age as Jan, named Pia (Janina Uhse), runs in to control her pet, Luna. Jan and Pia meet. Jan owns and runs his own bicycle store with his best friend, Alex (Edin Hasanovic), while Pia is a professional photographer with her own studio. Jan books a photo-shoot for Eddi only to get to know Pia better. Soon, they kiss and start dating. Pia reveals that her group of close friends is almost like family to her and that they have a tradition of celebrating game nights together, during which they play board games like Monopoly and Uno. Before going to the gathering, though, Jan has to prepare himself with the help of Alex, for the event is to be held at the house of Pia's rich friend, Karo (Anna Maria Muhe), who lives in Grunewald. Considered to be one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Berlin and situated near an extensive forest. Alex says that Jan does not have the option to bail out either. Alex also brings a game that Jan can introduce into the group called "Who would". The game cards detail a situation and the group has to decide who among them is the most likely to carry out the task like "Pee from a bridge". Jan and Pia belong to very different social backgrounds, and Pia's friends are very visibly rich. Karo is a designer by profession and runs her own furniture business. Her husband Oliver (Axel Stein) is a teacher at a trade school. The group also includes a pharmacist named Sheila (Taneshia Abt), who is known for being troubled in her romantic relationship with her girlfriends, and Kurt (Maximilian Meyer-Bretschneider), Karo's slightly eccentric brother, who has been staying at the couple's house for quite some time. Sheila is defensive over the breakup with her girlfriend Zora and says that they are just taking a break. But the game night starts off horribly for Jan. To begin with, Oli seems extremely snobbish in the initial phase of the gathering when he tries to make Jan appear like a fool because of the latter's lack of knowledge about board games. Jan discovers Oli's study. The room has numerous photographs of Oli framed and hung on the wall, and it also contains a perched pet cockatoo, which the man is very attached to. According to Oli, birds turn extremely violent if kept trapped in cages, and so he prefers to keep them open on a perch in his study. He has also named the pet Helmut Kohl after a famous German chancellor, and Karo mentions that his previous bird was named Angela Merkel after another ex-chancellor. Either way, Jan does not notice the bird when he enters the study and carelessly opens the window, leading to Helmut Kohl flying out onto a nearby tree almost immediately. From this point on, Jan has to keep trying to bring the bird back into the house while also not letting others know of its daring escape. After trying to lure the bird back with calls, Jan informs Alex about the situation, and the latter believes that his best friend is in grave danger. Therefore, Alex rushes to the house in Grunewald. Jan meets Alex outside and tells him to look for the bird, but he is now locked out of the house. Jan reenters through the kitchen window and realizes that the house maid Gabriela cooked the food, which Karo claimed that she had cooked. Karo finds Jan in the kitchen of the house, with their chef and maid, Gabriela (Alfonsina Bencosme). But more importantly, she spots her husband's shirt on her and grows suspicious that Oli is having an affair with Gabriela. Pia's ex-boyfriend, Mat (Stephan Luca), walks into the gathering and stays on as part of the game-night proceedings. It was Oli who had invited Pia's ex-boyfriend, Mat, to the party, as he is an old friend of the man. Throughout the evening, he keeps siding with Mat against Jan. To distract everyone Jan keeps asking Sheila about her relationship with Zora. Sheila had typed a text message for Zora, which she shows to Jan. Jan hands the phone to Mat, who says that the text has already been sent and blames Jan for sending it. Sheila also blames Jan. Mat keeps mentioning the sweet times that he shared with Pia in order to simply inform Jan about their relationship. He does not really mention the breakup with Pia, which she had obviously initiated, but instead harps on how he was once her fiance. In reality, Mat had proposed to Pia at a time when she was already falling out of love with him but could not take any steps yet. She did not even say yes to the proposal and just played along with it, but in Mat's stories, they were actually engaged and about to get married. Incidentally, Karo and Oli's neighbor, Mr. Fieper (Bernd Holscher), is also an erratic gentleman who is always on the lookout for wild boars straying into the private properties. During his search for Helmut Kohl, Alex has to venture into Fieper's property and is caught in a net trap that the man has laid down. Jan frees Alex from the net. Mat had already made this plan with his good friend Oli, and so all the questions asked during the trivia game were ones Pre-selected by Mat as he knew their answers. This was to prove how Jan had no knowledge about the world, history, or culture, while Mat was a genius in the trivia game, along with being a successful dentist in his professional life. But when Jan's game of having to choose the most ideal person for a selected task or situation is being played, the building tension between the two men gets even more heated up. Almost everyone picks Jan to be brave enough to fight a wild animal if needed, and Mat believes that he has more courage than him. Growing angry that his friends do not consider him brave enough, Oli simply enters a state of denial by slipping into the attire of his favorite fictional Mage, Ogandur, and keeps playing a role-playing video game on his laptop. Oli is livid that Karo controls everything in the house to maintain a facade that she runs a company, nurtures her baby and maintains the house like a superwoman. Oli and Karo don't even have sex anymore. Karo accuses Oli of having sex with Gabriela. But the real reason for Oli's reaction is that he is terribly hurt by his wife's insinuations, for he had only been trying to learn dancing from Gabriela. This was why his shirt was with her, not because of any extramarital affair. In fact, Gabriela actually grows romantically interested in Jan's best friend, Alex. In a wild display of talent, Mat and Jan strip naked and then battle against each other in a fiercely competitive game of table tennis. While the rest of the friends' cheer on the competition, Pia naturally finds this development to be gross and completely unnecessary. Thus, when Jan ultimately wins the game and tries to celebrate his success with her, Pia states that she is not an object or trophy to be won over through some silly competition. Jan leaves the house in anger, as this was the first thing he had won all night. Mat has to drink an entire bottle of Tabasco as he lost the match. Jan angrily leaves the house when he finds that Pia kissed Mat after she started dating Jan. Jan also brashly informing Oli that his beloved pet cockatoo had flown away. Alex is trapped in the net, this time with Jan (when they go to look for Alex's bike keys), while Mr. Fieper shoots down Helmut Kohl with a sedative dart. Although Jan had angrily left the house by then, he now changes his mind and decides to forgive Oli. Therefore, he returns Helmut Kohl to safety, ensuring that Oli does not have to lose his dear bird because of his silly mistakes. Mat is an extremely manipulative and insecure man, whose only intention at the moment is to embarrass Pia and make her grow concerned for him, which is a sign of love according to him. Therefore, he goes over to the Berlin Zoo in order to fight a tiger and prove his strength and courage, but ultimately shies away from any such act of bravado. But when Pia and her friends rush to the place, they cannot find Mat and fear that he might have been harmed by the animals. Jan, who also reaches the zoo after being informed by Kurt, does not hesitate to jump into the tiger enclosure after seeing Mat's phone in it and has to ultimately rush out after being chased by the wild animal. This proves to everyone in the group how Jan cares only about Pia's well-being and would not mind getting into any situation to ensure her happiness. At the same time, Mat also acknowledges that it was he who sent the text to Sheila's ex-girlfriend. Now that the stunt has paid off, Sheila is happy that the text was sent. Pia also realizes that while she has no feelings for Mat at all. Pia does reunite with Jan, and they once again become a couple after their short-lived misunderstanding. On the occasion of the next game night, all of Pia's friends gather at Jan's house for their usual gathering, meaning that they have truly accepted him as a friend by now.