Masterpiece (1970)

We finally sat down to do a test run of Masterpiece (1970) that I got a few weeks ago.  Even from just skimming the rule booklet, it felt like it would be better with more than two players.  With two players, we felt that Private Auction was unusable, since there are only two outcomes: I make a crazy low offer and you choose your cheapest painting to sell me, or you choose a painting and I offer you the minimum for it.  It takes two players to do a pretend auction, and if you can't bid on your own art, there is no point.  So we just rolled again whenever we landed on a Private Auction.

As I suspected, the big giant game board served no real purpose and could have been replaced with a little deck of action cards.  Either way, you randomly get one of these: cash, auction for the top painting on the deck, buy or sell a painting to the bank, buy or sell a painting to another player, or the one-off where you inherit a painting with no payment needed.

It basically comes down to the luck of the draw, which value card you get when you get a painting.  It could be anywhere from $100K to $1 million, with two FORGERY cards in the mix.  The are very few actual decisions to make, since each decision has a clearly best move:

- the bank or an opponent offers a fixed amount for a painting: sell them a forgery or your cheapest one

- you are bidding on a painting: bid low, maybe run up the opponent a step or two and give up, so they have to pay $100K more than they would have, or they give up and you have the best chance of coming out ahead

- you sell a painting to the bank at its actual value: which one you choose (if any) really just depends on whether you need cash or not at the time, since you get credit for the value of the painting at the end of the game anyway

The game comes with some "character" cards, but they serve no purpose.  They are just a picture and a shred of a backstory, with no stats on the cards, no bonus move, nothing to make a difference in the game play.  I could think of a few things that would be moderately useful, like each character having a list of two or three artists they specialize in, where they maybe get +$100K when selling or -$100K when buying, or both.  Other possible "skills": they get to roll again after a private auction or some other specific space or they get an extra $100K from any cash space.

Overall, it was fun throwing dice and going around a board for a while.  Most of the time, when a painting was sold, I read off the name and artist and value, since I'm always the banker in these games and figured it should at least feel like art was involved.

There was some fun in looking through our little collections of paintings and trying to remember which was the best or worst, but a bit of a bore to clip the prices to the backs.  

There are a bunch of numbers to add up at the end, so we found ourselves unclipping them all and making a stack of paintings and a stack of prices, then combining prices with cash to make stacks of a million each.

Other than the basic fun of the chat and banter which happen around any board game, this one doesn't add much one you've seen all the selected art pieces a few times.  It was strange having that big board for no good reason.  Maybe I WILL turn it into a deck of cards to see if it plays better that way.  It would certainly take up less space.