Fill your walls with fashionable paintings in Petrichor and Hamlet creators’ fetching board game Art Society
Games are art, art is games.
A new board game from the studio behind Petrichor, Vengeance and Hamlet will task you with curating your own home gallery of paintings, while managing to keep your collection in vogue.
Art Society comes from publisher Mighty Boards and first-time designer Mitch Wallace, who put players in the role of art experts trying to impress their fellow connoisseurs with a wall full of masterpieces.
The beginner-friendly game revolves around an auction phase - during which players acquire paintings by bidding using cards from their hand - and a placement phase, where they must carefully arrange them on their board to maximise their prestige.
Where you want to place your painting will be dictated by its size and shape, but also by its frame and type. Placing matching frames together earns bonus points, while putting two paintings with the same subject - city life, portrait, still life or landscape - side-by-side commits a faux pas and becomes worth zero.
Paintings left over during each auction round add to that painting type’s prestige, increasing their desirability - and point value - at the end of the game, meaning you’ll want to balance going for valuable paintings with trying to boost the value of paintings you already have by leaving them unclaimed.
It sounds like a blend of Reiner Knizia’s auction game classic Modern Art and a tile-placement game in the vein of Patchwork, and is described as being easy to learn and playable in under an hour with two to four people.
Art Society will release straight to retail in November, priced at $40. Ahead of its release, it will be available to play digitally via Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia.
