LogFAQs > #933318815

69. Modern Art (1992)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Set collection, push-your-luck, bidding
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 35-50 minutes
Experience: 2-3 plays over 2-3 sessions (2018-19) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: NR (2016), NR (2018)

Summary - During each of four rounds, players choose to offer and then bid on pieces of art (cards from hand) from five artists (suits/colors). At the end of a round, depending on how many total paintings were sold of each artist, the paintings are valued and sold to the bank. There are four different types of auctions, which are specific to the cards sold, including blind bids, English-style open auctions, single-circle bids, and fixed price bids.

Design - Modern Art is another Reiner Knizia game, one of his earliest breakout games. Knizia is renowned for the simplicity of his rules, the difficulty of the decisions, and the interactivity of the gameplay. The experience is often described as emergent, and that comes through in Modern Art: you have to decide to what suit to offer but also how you want it to be valued; how to value pieces on offer; which suit(s) to gamble on; whom to buy from (should you get the choice).

Thematically, Modern Art suggests there's no inherent value to the artwork you're bandying around. The most valuable art is the art that is marketed the most. But that value then is carried over to subsequent rounds: value gained from popularity in round three is added to value from popularity gained in rounds one and two: Last season's fashions continue to inform today's prices.

But in one of the most Knizian twists of the game, only the three most popular artists' paintings get bought each round. So if it's round 2 and you're investing in round 1's most popular paintings and hoping for a boost to its already strong value, you could actually wind up getting nothing at all for your investment. The market has a light card draw effect but is otherwise almost entirely set by what players chose to offer. And therefore, it's incredibly interactive. Beyond even that, there's a minigame of who you want to buy from; if you buy my offer then I get that money, while if I'm stuck buying my own offer, I pay to the bank. Whose pain is better? Who are you letting profit?

In a similar move to Acquire's pain point where you can only buy stock after you've already boosted its value, Modern Art allows you to end a round by offering a fifth piece of art from any one suit, guaranteeing that it will become the most popular artist of the round... but, no one actually gets a chance to bid on that piece of art, so you ensure you don't get that piece - or the proceeds from selling it.

Experience - I think if I were just slightly better at it, Modern Art could be a lot higher up. As is, I haven't got quite enough reps in on it. The nature of Knizia games can be rather punishing if you don't grasp them quickly, and since the game is short, it's not like I've gotten a ton of time to bask in its design.

Future - Alas, the person who owns it in my group doesn't play much anymore, and it cannot be played with two players, which makes it a very iffy buy for me at best. But I'd love to play it more, due to its elegance and quickness and how much I admire its design. I could see Modern Art rising a lot - but it's constrained by experience.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness