Monet Well Spent: A Modern Art Review

Reiner Knizia’s Modern Art is less a board game and more the Platonic Ideal of what a board game should aspire to be. It is the game that caused me to stop the practice, begun in my feckless youth, of never giving a 10/10 rating, no matter how good a game is. This is the Game (with a capital, cursive G) that made me realize that stars, thumbs, and the tyranny of other internet scoring systems are stupid and that sometimes, someone makes something so amazing that it deserves a full rating.

Now, this isn’t to say that Modern Art is better than, say, John Company. Where Cole Wehrle is the master of creating vast, complex webs of politics, intrigue and systemic rot, Knizia is king of the lean, precise, and enduring. This is anti-Kickstarter, the game that calls us to cast off the burden of minis, stretch goals, and FOMO, to stand, stark and vulnerable, at the altar of Pure Game Design.

So how does it work? You’re an art dealer, trying to turn a profit by buying and selling paintings from 5 artists whose careers rise and fall with the fickle whims of you and your friends. On your turn, you auction a painting, but the twist is that the game throws 5 different auction types at you.

The market decides which artists are worth anything, based on how many of their paintings were sold, and it’s as cruel as it is capricious. It’s the kind of game where you might sell a worthless painting for a small fortune with a perfectly timed bluff, only to disastrously overpay on the next turn because you got greedy.

But that’s the genius of Knizia. Modern Art only lives because we players breathe life into it. He dares to make us the heart of his game. There is no wizard behind the curtain calculating values. We decide what things are worth. Value itself is changeable, laughable, and tragic. By the third round when you’ve auctioned off your hideous painting for $76, you’ve realized that the game’s subject isn’t really art- it’s humanity, greed, and the spark of evil joy you get from selling your friend something you know is totally not worth it.

To think that this bow-tie-wearing god was once just a lowly doctor! This should give us all hope. He makes it look so easy, churning out his simple, brilliant games, time and time again. But I think what he’s truly the master of is restraint. To Knizia, a game isn’t finished when there’s nothing left to add…it’s finished when there’s nothing left to take away. Modern Art gestures to all those grand Kickstarters and whispers: “Look at all that junk. You don’t need that. I’m all you need. A deck of ugly cards and a hint of your ruthless ambition.”

Each of the auction types subtly preys on our psyche and allows us to prey on others’. Sure, I don’t like the art but I’m happy someone else wants it, for the right price. On and on it goes, turning the entire act into a social construct.

These are the kind of games that are few and far between (or would be if he didn’t make like 50 games a year) because they take brilliance to create. Games that get rid of the noise and leave you with clearer, sharper thoughts in the end. Games that make you see the other players as friends, rivals, and occasionally fools. Games that leave you wondering why we clutter our shelves with anything less than perfection.

Modern Art doesn’t just challenge how you play- it challenges how you think. 10/10.