As promised, the review/impression of Modern Art.
First, the components that I mentioned yesterday. The scoring/currency chips aren’t as bad as I had thought. You need to hold them in a closed hand, so small is important, as is plastic (so they don’t get destroyed by sweat, pizza grease, etc.). So that’s OK. Less OK is the absence of a 10 denomination (only 1, 5, 20, 50, 100) but it’s no big deal.
The screens, however, are even worse than I had thought. They’re so light and flimsy that a tiny breeze knocks them right over. Evidently I have a habit of exhaling sharply through my nose when thinking, which I never notice unless it blows over the tiny paper screen on the table right below me. A curse upon them.
On to the actual game. It’s classic Knizia. There’s nothing but the auctions. So is it fair? Darn near (but see below). The idea of the game is that the more paintings by a painter are sold, the more each one will be worth. Each player can offer up paintings for auction, and has the choice to offer a painting by a popular painter (likely to sell for more money), but if the player doesn’t want this painter to be even more popular (perhaps he doesn’t have any paintings by that painter), he could offer something else.
One of the neat quirks is the several different flavors of auction, which is a property of the painting that’s being auctioned. There’s an ordinary auction; an auction where each player makes one bid in secret; a once-around-the-table bid where you can only make one bid; and a fixed-price auction where the auctioneer names a price and the bidders can only take it or leave it. There’s also a “double auction” that gives the player a chance to offer another painting by the same artist as part of the same auction. This is the biggest imbalance in the game: double auctions give the player that happens to draw them a lot of control over the value of paintings. A suggested houserule, which I am likely to adopt, is that the double auction cards are separated from the rest of the deck and dealt separately (and evenly), away from the rest of the cards.
Modern Art is not for everyone; if you don’t enjoy the at-times fiddly considerations of how much a painting is likely to be worth, you’re probably not going to like the game. I have an intuitive feeling that very few people are going to start out skeptical but end up won over. Maybe later I’ll think about what patterns I’ve seen that have led to this intuition.
Recommendation: If you and at least two other people you game with are Knizia fans, get the game. You’ll enjoy it. If you’re not already Knizia fans, I don’t think Modern Art is worth the low production value and the risk of not being into him; I’d try something else to start, like Taj Mahal.