LogFAQs > #961305752

67. The Gallerist

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/125153/gallerist

Category: Player vs Player
Key mechanics: Action selection, set collection, economic
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 7
Game length: 2-3 hours
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play, 4 players
Previous ranks: N/A

Vital Lacerda, the designer of The Gallerist, has a James Joyce-esque reputation among board gamers - extremely dense, hard to grasp, intricate, rewarding, etc.

The Gallerist is the second Lacerda game I've played. In it you run an art gallery, and on your turn you take one of a wide variety of actions, including commissioning art, trying to buy art, attracting visitors to your gallery, competing for an endgame international auction, selling art out of your gallery, hiring your assistants to do your dirty work, and the like. There are several trackers that show you positioning that you've earned or how famous an artist has become or what your piece of art is currently worth.

The Gallerist is the first of many eurogames to appear on this list, in which your form of competition is primarily to occupy action spaces, collect resources, or fulfill orders *before* or *better* your opponent can, attempting to maximize efficiency. Lacerda makes his game slightly interactive by allowing you the power of displacement; your primary action selection is done using a player pawn that goes into one of four areas, and if anyone else on their turn chooses to go to the area to which you've gone, you get a "kickout" action on your opponent's turn, allowing you to get extra efficiency. Additionally, you've got special actions you can also take on your turn outside of your primary action. It's all very neat and intricate.

It's also fiddly and possibly overly complex. The theoretical elegance of a "one-action turn" is somewhat undermined by the fact that that single action can result in many bookkeeping steps (i.e. buying art increases that artist's fame, thus increasing the price of artist's works for everyone involved; this also for some reason triggers new visitors to arrive in the common area), but that even then you still have so many actions before you can accomplish your goals (but you need two special movements to get those visitors into your own gallery, which you need to do in order to sell stuff, but only if you have the special order that lets you sell them...) Add other players taking extra actions and actions out of the flow of normal turns thanks to the kickout mechanism, and you've got a game that doesn't really flow.

I admire the system that has gone into it and would play again, as it does feel like the type of game that needs repeated plays in order for it to flow nicely. Maybe I can seek it out again at the meetup, if again it has experienced players.

Hint for 66 - not that often you feel this gassy on another planet