MODERN ART - High Stakes Bidding in the Galleries
By Nick Clark, Tom Coppin, and Alex Ceglia
Discussion of Formal Elements
3-5 players -- we played with 3. Each player was dealt 10 cards and $100,000 in chips. Game play proceeds in a clockwise fashion and is turn based. However, unlike other turn based games, all players actively participate in each turn. The game ends after four rounds are played.
Discussion of Dramatic Elements
In “Modern Art”, players compete to gain the most money in a series of art auctions. Each player represents a different auction house. In our case, Alex represented a New York auction house, Nick was Los Angeles, and Tom Chicago. All players take turns running the auctions, based on five different styles of auction. The cards dealt to each player represent paintings by one of the five artists featured in the game. The chips dealt to each player and earned throughout the game are used to bid on the paintings. Whoever offers the top bid buys the painting and must sell it at the end of the round. The price each painting will fetch is based on the popularity of the artist and how well his paintings have sold in the past. The player with the most money at the end of four rounds of buying and selling wins.
CHOICE is the Name of the Game
The game was a bit difficult to pick up initially, the sort of the game you actually had to play to understand. It took us a good 15 minutes to get through the rule book and we began playing with a lot of unanswered questions in our heads. Having said that, within a couple minutes of actually playing, we began to understand the basics of the game. The key word here is CHOICE. Very little is left to chance. Players must, among other things, choose which painting to bid on, how much to bid for a particular painting, which painting to sell and for how much, which type of auction to hold, and when to do each of the aforementioned things. As a result, we were somewhat overwhelmed with the sheer number of decisions we had to make the first time we played the game. We didn’t really understand how our decisions might affect the outcome until the second time around, and even then we were still learning from our decisions (and mistakes). Choice is definitely a good thing, as it ensures that the game can be appreciated on a number of different levels. Choice adds a lot of depth to the game and makes for good replay value.
Emerging Elements, Strategic Choices and Gameplay Highlights
The following are just a few scenarios we came across while playing that illustrate the strategic complexity of the game and some of the choices the players are faced with.
Tom invokes a double auction, ending the round prematurely and to his advantage, before paintings from three different artists have been sold.
The order in which artists' names appear on the board became a factor in the event of a tie, which happened more often that we had originally anticipated. We learned that artists whose name appears on the left side of the board are inherently more valuable than those whose name appears on the right side of the board.
The number of cards of a particular artist you are holding in your hand helps dictate which artist you might bid on.
The longer we played, the better we got at accurately estimating a painting's actual or potential worth, which in turn allowed us to bid more wisely. In this photo, we all calculated that Karl Gitter’s painting would be worth a minimum of 40,000 dollars, provided he finished in the top three this round, because of his first place finish in the previous round.
Alex lost both games in the fourth round, despite beginning the round with a substantial lead, because he did not appreciate the importance of selling paintings to the other players and the dangers of buying paintings from other players. There’s an advantage to buying your own painting: the money you spend goes to the bank and not another player.
In this photo, Alex and Nick formed a spontaneous alliance, ganging up on poor Tom, who had invested heavily in paintings by Yoko. As a result of the alliance, Yoko finished third, causing Tom to lose a portion of his investment.
