Art for Art’s Sake

The world of art is filled with many extremely talented individuals. They use their medium of choice to evoke all manner of feelings, from nostalgia, to joy, to pain, to hate, to love, and everything in-between. Different museums and galleries clamor to get well-known and world-renown artist’s works into their collections. That is where you find yourself in Modern Art: The Card Game. This lighter version of Modern Art still sees players looking to collect and score the most valuable art collection in an all-new and quicker playing form. Let’s take a look at how this version works.

Setting up the game is quick, beginning with setting out the 5 Artist cards in order, the numbers on the cards representing how many pieces of artwork each has in the game. Those Artwork cards are shuffled together and dealt out to each player, everyone getting 13 cards to begin with. Sort the different tokens by value and set them aside. Finally, the top card of the remaining Artworks cards is flipped over, showing an extra card that will be counted as Displayed and will count towards that artist’s Influence in the round. And that’s all. The player who most recently went to a museum is the first player and they will begin the first round.

The game is played over a series of rounds, during which, players will pick artwork from their hand to add to their Display area. These represent art pieces that the player has chosen to add to their gallery. Certain cards have special abilities on them, such as letting the player Display a second piece of artwork from the same artist, draw extra artwork cards, or give an Award to an artist of the player’s choice. Players continue, in turn, playing their artwork cards from their hand until a certain number of pieces from a given artist is Displayed. The number of artwork cards required to trigger this condition varies with the number of players. But once it’s met, the round is scored.