Valerie Putman:  Master’s Gallery (aka Modern Art: The Card Game)

It’s Modern Art without the auctions.  Hard to imagine, right?  It’s the exact same game released under two different titles at the same time with different art and a different box.  Confusing, right?  But is it fun?  Actually, it is!

FRED games showed off Reiner Knizia’s Masters Gallery and Modern Art:  The Card Game this year at the Gathering.  Modern Art: The Card Game comes in a small box with cards and chips.  The cards represent artists from the original game (like a Knizia portrait by Lite Metal, etc.), that are eventually worth different amounts depending on how many players are displaying them at the end of the round.  But instead of having a hand of cards that will be auctioned off one by one in different auction formats, each player simply chooses a card from their hand and adds it to their own display.  Some of the cards do have special abilities—for example, a card might allow you to immediately play another card to your display face down or draw a card to add to your hand.  Once one artist is popular enough (the 6th card from the same artist when looking at all the displays), the chips are used to assign 1st, 2nd, and 3rd most popular and points are awarded.  Like in the original game, players use the remainder of their hand plus some new cards in subsequent rounds with no new cards in the final round (except in a 2-player game).  Also like the original, artists are worth more in subsequent rounds if they have been popular before, but must be in the top 3 to score at all.  It really does feel like Modern Art, but without the auctions!

I think that the card game version will be easier for new players—auction games can be hard to teach because the value of things, especially in a game like Modern Art, can be really variable and hard for a non-gamer to evaluate.  On the other hand, I think that the hand you are dealt, which already can have a big influence in Modern Art, has an even bigger impact in the card game.  In the end, I think that Modern Art: the Card Game is a light, fun filler that is more likely to be a hit with the non-gaming family than the original.  For me, it was also fun to revisit the familiar artists of the original game.

Master’s Gallery is in the same size box as Roll Through the Ages and the rest of FRED’s new numbered series, Gryphon Games the Bookshelf Series. (Master’s Gallery is number 9 in the series—preceded by Money, Roll Through the Ages, Gem Dealer, For Sale, High Society, Incan Gold, Looting London, and Birds on a Wire.) Master’s Gallery has real artists (Jan Vermeer, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Vincent Van Gogh) instead of the fictional artists of the original.  Otherwise, game play is identical to Modern Art: the Card Game.  Master’s Gallery might be an even better choice for the non-gamer, since they won’t understand all the inside jokes about Yoko and Christin P. anyway.

I’d rather be gaming,
Valerie Putman

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