A Fine Art

As a contemporary fine art dealer, you earn a living through selling valuable artworks and hosting extravagant exhibitions. But beneath the glitzy surface, the industry is rather cut-throat …and your competitors will use every dirty trick in the book to advance themselves at your expense! Great skill is required to navigate the rigged auctions, cunning forgeries and outright thefts to emerge as the finest of fine art dealers!

A Fine Art is played over multiple rounds, with players having the option to participate in an exhibition, an auction and a private sales phase per round.

Exhibition phase

All players decide if they wish to publicly exhibit up to five of their artworks to raise money. Players may conduct one forgery analysis on an exhibited artwork if they believe it may be a fake.

The amount of money collected from a player's exhibition is determined by the popularity of the artworks shown at all the exhibits in that round, or if they are showing a set of five artworks that are all the same size.

Auction phase

All players decide if they wish to anonymously sell any of their artworks from their private collection at the auction. If so, they start a new shell company if they don't have one already. The player holding the auctioneer token acts as the auctioneer for that round - they run the auction and direct players to bid on each artwork for sale (the artworks for sale consist of the old artworks that didn’t sell at previous auctions, plus any new artworks that were added to the auction in that round).

Once the auction is complete, the winning bidders pay the indicated shell company and collect their newly purchased art. Players may then choose to collect their money from the sales of the artwork via their shell company.

Private sales phase

Each player who didn't win any bids at the auction may choose to announce particular types of artwork(s) they'd like to buy via a private sale. Others may then choose to privately sell their artwork to that player. Once the player has taken any offered artworks, the next player in the clockwise direction announces the artworks they want to buy, and so on.

Once all of these players have had an opportunity to request and buy artworks, the phase ends. If the New Art deck is not empty, the auctioneer gives the auctioneer token to the next player in a clockwise direction and another round is played.

Otherwise, if the New Art deck is depleted, run one final exhibition and then determine the winner. The winner is the player with the most cash (artworks do not count towards a player's cash).