Sunday, we played a game that I recently found out about on boardgamearena.com and bought from funagain.com - a deck building game about paintings called Art Decko. I'm a big fan of Dominion and have played some other deck-building games that were ok, but none that caught my attention like Art Decko did after playing it just one time.
Beth, Isaac, and I played, with Beth starting the game as first player after I explained the game. After getting into the game a bit, Beth was the first to Exhibit a painting. I still wasn't getting enough money or valuable paintings at good times to put any of my paintings into the Museum, but I was still able to keep collecting them. Isaac was able to get one or two into the Museum also before I was able to, but that worked in my favor since one of the Bonus tiles in the Museum was for the player that has the least paintings in there. At the end of the game, Beth had a significant lead around the score track, with around 40 points and I had only half that, with Isaac in the middle. However, I had a huge collection of cards and had managed to get many of the top valued paintings.
I also had many coin cards. All of the 5-coin cards were purchased, but not many of the 3-coin cards had been, so the exchange rate for the coins was pretty high, but had gone over the optimal value into the 2:1 ratio. In the end, I jumped ahead in score and looped around the score track, passing Beth and Isaac.
Overall, I really enjoy this game. My wife also thought this game was fun and mentioned that it was much better than she had anticipated. She also really liked the artwork on the cards. (I also like the artwork on this game and on the Modern Art card game, but Beth really dislikes about half of the cards in Modern Art.)
Unfortunately, I do have a couple little complaints regarding the game board, but the game play was great and I still think it's well worth picking up this game.
My first complaint about game board is that the Market spaces are too small. Technically they do fit the cards, but the Market is right on the edge of the board and since this space is where most of change is happening on the board, the cards are often shifted over and just floating off the edge of the board. I would like to have seen the Market in the center of the board, or at least more toward the center, with the Museum on the edge, since those don't always get filled up.
My second complaint about the game board is that I don't like the Scoring Track design. I think it would have been better to have a separate Scoring Track, like what was used for tracking the Market Values. If the Scoring track hadn't gone through the middle of the game board, the Market spaces could have had more space even if they weren't moved to where the Museum is at. Also, since the scores go up to 79 and then loops back to 0, it makes final scoring a little weird, especially since the rulebook suggests flipping the players' reference cards over to group cards together and multiply them for scores. We actually had a situation where one player had counted spaces around the board for their points and for another the score was quickly totaled and jumped to the seemingly appropriate value over 100, until reevaluating the end results.