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Travis Cooper
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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Modern Art Play Log
Modern Art
It took me a while to finally get my own copy of Ra. I had heard many good things about it, and finally got a chance to play it only to find it was between printings. When the new printing finally came out I picked it up the day it hit the shelves. A few months ago I finally decided to see what Medici was all about. This mostly came about from a 6+ player suggestion thread I started, and many people suggested it.
Well, I had Modern Art on my wishlist (with a low priority) for a while. I mostly did this to round out the N/A. I'm not sure why I felt I needed to have it completed, but I did. In my last order I decided to finally pull the trigger on this one. Yeah, I realize I bought them in opposite order they were released, but I still have them all now.
Today's Game
So we got a chance to pull this out today during lunch. I had already read the rules, but none of us had played before. Most of the people there had played Medici and all but one have played Ra and Priests of Ra quite a bit. So I ran down the rules and we got started on our bidding wars for art.
At first it took people a minute to recognize what the values were, but as we got into later rounds we quickly saw that getting out the same artists that paid out in previous rounds was very valuable. This was probably an anomaly in our game, but we only had 3 artists ever make the top 3.
John of course was the most interesting auctioneer. I have to tip my hat to him in running the traditional auctions. In fact he mostly tried to play those cards just so he could do it. I kept putting fixed auction cards down and probably low-balled them a bit, in fact one round I did a double auction for cards that were obviously about to make $100K, but I only had $78K so I had to give Amanda a good deal on them.
In the end I made some very good profits off of my paintings. I steadily kept earning money over the course of each season. When we tallied up the points John and I were way ahead of everybody. I finished with $410K and he finished with $409K. Probably the most interesting thing to me was that John didn't buy a single piece of art, but he was still able to keep up with my profits.
Does it work for lunch?
I think it definitely works for lunch. Even with explaining and 5 new people we finished before the hour was up. I truly enjoyed the game, even though I didn't really know how much money people had throughout. It was just fun to bid on the pieces of art. I really liked that there were so many different types of auctions all in the same game. Will this work for your group? I think it has a lot of potential. I still prefer Priests of Ra for deeper strategy, and I would suggest getting that one first. However, I enjoyed my first play through of this and I'm sure it will see many more.
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