LogFAQs > #966752185

29. Modern Art

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/118/modern-art

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Auction, hand management, set collection, push-your-luck
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-60 minutes
First played: 2018
Experience: 4-8 plays with 4-5 players

In Modern Art, players are art dealers, buying art at auctions and selling them at the end of the season to the public. Each player is dealt a hand of cards containing artwork including two features: the artist and an auction type (open auction, turn-based, hidden-bid, or set-price). Players take turns being the auctioneer, meaning that they display a piece of art from their hand, along with the auction type. The other players then bid for that art, with the winner paying the dealer for it.

At the end of a season (a set number of rounds), each artist's art is valued based on how many of their pieces of art were sold, and all of the auctioned art is liquidated into cash. The catch is that only the top three artists of a season have any demand for their art; the remaining two artists' art is thrown away. Over the course of four seasons, the price of an artist's work can actually be compounded, since last season's popularity affects this season's price - but even so, only the top three most popular artists from this season will have their art bought.

One of the older games on this list, Modern Art is a classic Knizia design. It features abstraction in mechanics, an amazing implementation of that distilled mechanic itself, meaningful player interaction, push-your-luck elements, and a cool theme with beautifully cynical implications.

You don't really spend any time managing the art itself, or in running the gallery, hiring underlings, or anything else. You buy art. And you sell art. Directly to other players. In an auction. There are four different auction types, and each of them has its own style. The open-auction and blind-bidding put the onus more on the bidders, putting you in direct competition (either open or invisible); the set-price auction puts the onus on the auctioneer and gives the advantage to the player to the left of the auctioneer; the one-shot bid gives the advantage/final say to the player to the right of the auctioneer. And you're always considering that you're competing with your opponents for art, trying to influence your own artists' popularity without tipping your hand to their valuation, and paying or receiving money from your opponents directly.

That push-your-luck element - you don't know what art others have and which ones they want to play - is also incredibly Knizian; you can try your hardest to win the first three pieces of art shown in a round, but if you don't actually have the cards to pump that artist going forward, you have no guarantee that it'll actually do anything. In another Knizian turn, the fifth piece of art displayed by an artist immediately ends a round with no bidding; it influences popularity, but since its value is known for sure, no one gets to bid on it. You have to evaluate everything with incomplete information.

And of course, while the chrome is lacking, Knizia actually presents a pretty comical take on the world of art collecting. Each piece of art has zero intrinsic art characteristics! Instead of making judgments on the quality of the art - and hey, these are actual abstract paintings on your cards that you can examine! - Knizia gets straight at the idea of what actually sells. And the answer to what sells is: what's popular. As dealers, your wheelings and dealings actually cast you as influencer as well. If the big minds think this artist is hot, then all of their art that season is commoditized and becomes hot. And if the same artists is the most popular year-in, year-out? Forget about it, their art becomes the gold standard. They might go out of style, and then quickly your collection turns to garbage... until they come back in style, just as expensive as before. It's a great little bit of social commentary, and while that doesn't affect the gameplay materially, it enriches the "text" of the game.

Of course, the brilliance aside, Modern Art is fun to play. Because it's so stripped down, there's nothing really getting in your way of just enjoying this auction. That might also be its downside - when you get your ass kicked in a Knizia game, there aren't a lot of shared laughs, and you can't look happily at the farm/castle/space colony you've built for yourself, and you don't really get to reminisce over razing your opponent's strongholds or anything. You just realize you badly lost the math game. Which doesn't mean the game is bad; it just offers no minigames or chrome with which to amuse yourself.