Modern Art

It's a designer (also known as German) game. We played. I won.

Formal Elements

Object: Players try to finish the game with the most money by selling and buying art cards.

Core Mechanic: Players take turns putting up art for auction.

Basic Rules: Players start with a $100,000 in chips. Players buy and sell artworks from five different artists based upon their possible future value at the end of a season. When 5 pieces of art from a single artist are sold, the season ends and the most popular artist's work sells for $30,000 each, the second most popular for $20,000, and the third most popular for $10,000. You play for four seasons. An artist's work can gain more value if they were in the top 3 during the prior season.

A player starts with chips and art cards to put up for auction. Each art card has a specific type of auction - open, fixed price, secret, once-around, and double (which simply means an additional card from the same artist is put on auction together). Each auction has it's own specific rules for determining the winner. The winner pays the auctioneer.

Within the game are a series of rules that break ties both within an auction and within a season.

You have a hidden amount of money, and the winner is the one with the most money at the end of the four seasons. Ways to gain money - sell art at the end of the season and auction off art. Way to invest (and possibly lose) money - buying art.

Dramatic Elements

The entire set up as an art auction is the dramatic element of the game. The game could be boiled down to strictly numbers, but it guised in the set up of an art world. Each players is a gallery that purchases works of art by artists, trying to determine their future value. The dramatic elements of the game are fairly simple.

Dynamic Elements

The first dynamic element is deciding what art piece to put up for auction. You make a strategic choice based upon what art pieces have already sold and what remaining auction cards you have in your hand. By placing a piece of art up for auction you hope to accomplish two things simultaneously: sell the piece for a lot of money and raise the overall value of your gallery. Your overall value of your gallery is based upon how many total cards of a given artist are displayed in all of the galleries.

The second dynamic element is the type of auction you select (based upon the card options in your hand) The most dramatic auction is the double auction, when two pieces go up for sale. This can often propel the value of a given artist in a season. Other auctions choices are also strategic, putting up secret auction versus an open auction can trick people into "overpaying" for a piece. A once around auction leaves only one opportunity for people to make price that can be outbid by the auctioneer at the end. A fixed price auction allows the auctioneer to make the price and let the players take it or leave it. The trick for auction selection is try to gauge how the other players will "misvalue" a piece of art and find the appropriate auction to take advantage. For instance, if a piece of art is completely undervalued because other players think it cannot possibly have value at season end, you might select the once around auction, so each player gets one bid and will likely bid low and then purchase the piece for yourself. Likewise, if a piece you think is your opponents will overvalue, you might hold a secret auction to get them to overbid.

The third dynamic element is collecting art pieces, or purchasing art. You are purchasing art with the hope that it will be worth more than what you paid. But you are also purchasing art to increase the value of what you already have AND to decrease the value of what your opponents have.