Art Gallery

• Designer: Francesco Frittelli
• Publisher: Piatnik
• Players: 2-6
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Piatnik

The world-famous Art Gallery is not only home of the most magnificent paintings in the world, but also enjoys the reputation of providing its visitors with first-class and informative tours. Today the preparations for the opening of the new exhibition start: Slip into the role of a tour guide, visit the museum rooms and study the paintings as best you can. Choose the best route through the museum and find on a coherent sequence. Those who succeed in doing this can present their tour to inquisitive tourists at the end and receive commendation and prestige.

In Art Gallery, you compete with other tour guides to set up the best tour through the museum.  The museum is set up using modular pieces; based on the number of players in the game.  Essentially, there will be a shop at one end and then a number of artworks hanging on the walls.  In each area, there is a bench for the player pawns as well as a small chart to record who arrived earliest in each room.  There is a circular path that connects all the areas.

Each player gets an identical set of nine action cards at the start of the game.  The 48 painting cards are shuffled and one is dealt to each gallery space.  Each painting card has up to four attributes in the upper left corner.  The 48 tiles, which match the art of the cards, are shuffled and then stacked on the four differently priced stands in the shop.

The game is played in rounds until one of the end game conditions is met.  Each round has two phases – a placement phase and then a collection phase.  In the placement phase, there are 4 rounds.  In turn order, the active player plays one of their action cards and then moves that many spaces clockwise or counter-clockwise.  They then place one of their markers in the lowest visible number in the bar in that area.  Then, the player places one action card facedown on the pile there.  The next player then goes; this continues until all players have done this four times; meaning each has played a total of 8 cards.  Now, everyone reveals their final card.  The player with the highest card takes the start player card; if there is a tie, start player simply moves clockwise one position.

In the collection phase, you start at the shop and then go clockwise around the board.  In the shop, you flip over the action cards played there without changing the order, so that the card at the bottom corresponds to the first marker in the player arrival bar.  The owner of each card then can take 1 or 2 tiles from the top of the stacks in the shop using the value of their card as currency.  The stacks cost 1, 3, 5, or 7 each.  It is possible to split the value of your card into 2 stacks, or you can simply take one tile.  Tiles are taken in the order of arrival to the shop.  Once all players have taken tiles, again starting from the lowest numbered space in the bar, players take back their marker from the bar and then also take any one of the action cards played to that area.  Continue this until all markers and all cards are taken.

Now move clockwise to the first gallery.  Again flip over the cards without changing the order.  In the galleries, the player with the highest sum of played cards will win the painting.  Additionally, any “zero” cards here are worth 10, not zero.  If there is a tie for most, it is broken in favor of the player who holds the tile that matches the painting.  If not, the player who arrived earlier wins the tie.  Whoever wins the painting takes it and places it face up in front of him, always to the right of any previously gained art cards.  Do not change the order of the cards!  Now, like in the shop,  starting from the lowest numbered space in the bar, players take back their marker from the bar and then also take any one of the action cards played to that area.  Continue this until all markers and all cards are taken.

At the end of the round, refill any empty gallery spaces.  Players should again have 9 cards in their hand, though the composition of their hand is likely different than when they started.  Check to see if the game ends, if not, play another round.

The game ends at the end of a round when one of three things has happened:

• Any player has ten art cards
• The shop has no more tiles remaining on three of the four stacks
• There are not enough art cards to fill the galleries

Now it is time for final scoring, there are four things to add up:

• Painting cards – look at each of the four attributes, find the most valuable contiguous row of symbols for each attribute and add up the points for those four rows.
• Painting tiles – 3VP for a tile which you also have the card; 1VP for tiles otherwise
• Action cards – add up the nine cards you have at the end of the game, divide by 4, rounding down
• First player – 3VP to whoever won the first player token in the final round

The player with the most points wins, ties broken in favor of the player with the most tiles.

My thoughts on the game

When I was doing my research for Spiel 2023, I stumbled across this one, and after a read of the introduction, I was interested.  Piatnik isn’t a company that I usually look at during Spiel as their games tend to be more on the family/party side, but in the past few years, they have had games that seem more attractive to the kennerspiel crowd.

There are a lot of different things going on here, most interesting to me is the distribution of bid cards. I really like the way that the composition of your hand will change from round to round; I think there is a lot of cleverness going on here.  That being said, the way that being first to a location gives your priority in all decisions at that location turns the game into more of a race sometimes than anything else.   It might have been even more interesting if the last player at a location got the first choice of bid card.  In that way, a player might try to just hit a location where he wasn’t going to win the painting, but might be able to get a better card out of the deal.   Also, this might stop players from playing their strongest card when going first to a painting space if they weren’t sure to get it back.    As it stands now, the first player to a space gets tiebreaker on the actual auction and they also get to choose cards first.  Thus, for at least that area, there is no risk they won’t get back the bid card they played first.

The competition seems strongest in the Shop – with players going there often and repeatedly.  Each tile in the shop is worth a point, and it could be worth as much as 3.  Making sure that you have some tiles is a good way to bank points.  Our group does seem to have some disagreement on whether it’s better to grab tiles early and then hope that those matching paintings come up for auction later… or if it’s better to grab paintings on the cheap and then try to luck into the tiles in the shop.  The tile availability issue also changes with player count. With 3 players, it is quite common to see all players getting 2 tiles from the shop in a round.  If you play with the max 6 players, you could get shut out!  Of course, if you skip the shop in the first few rounds, you’re likely getting the first position in the art galleries, and I’ve already outlined the advantages of that earlier…

Regardless of which end of the argument you fall on, you’ll likely agree with all of us in wanting larger numbers on the painting cards.  While each tile does have a snippet of the painting on it, it would be nice if the identifying number was larger and more legible so you don’t have to search around to see where that little cropped bit came from on the tile.

As the game moves on, the auctions for the paintings break down a bit – and this is due to the scoring system.  You’re likely only working on whatever icon(s) are currently in a streak in your display, and there could be rounds where you literally don’t want to win any of the paintings if you’re protecting a run.  The developer in me wonders whether it would have been interesting to allow you to slide a painting on either end of your display to help make more paintings have value to you on a turn.  

Overall, there are a lot of good ideas here, and everything works fine – but I am left with the feeling that this actually could have been a much better game.  As such, it’s one that I’d happily play again, but probably wouldn’t ask for.  For someone who loves art and going to museums, it might hit a sweet spot with all of the different artworks represented in the game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. 
• Neutral. Dale
• Not for me…