Modern Art Review – How I Conned My Friends and Got Rich

Disclaimer: Modern Art was provided for free by Let’s Play Games, a Australian and New Zealand board game distributor. They’re also putting Aussie board gamers in touch with their local board game stores through the website Local Game Stores. As always, all opinions in this review are my own.

I had my Grunkle Stan moment opening the package from Let’s Play Games—finally, I had them all. With Modern Art in hand, my collection of Reiner Knizia’s legendary auction games was complete: Medici, Ra, and now Modern Art.

You might think I’m going overboard with auction games, but despite sharing the same core mechanic, each one feels completely different.

Medici is precise and calculating—you can often predict the outcome of an auction before it even begins. Ra thrives on pushing your luck, blending risk-taking with light strategy. And Modern Art… well, you’ll just have to keep reading to find out.

How to play

Can you predict which artist is about to make it big? Modern Art puts you in the role of an art dealer, where a painting’s value isn’t about the artwork itself, it’s about what the table decides it’s worth. Six million for a banana taped to a wall? Sure, why not.

That said, you don’t start with six million to throw around. Each player begins with a modest $100,000 in cash and a hand of paintings from five real-world contemporary artists: Manuel Carvalho, Sigrid Thaler, Daniel Melim, Ramon Martins, and Rafael Silveira. The artwork is as varied as it is striking—ranging from surreal to bold and abstract—giving you the sense of wandering through a modern art museum.

Beyond the eye-catching visuals, each card features two key details: the artist’s name and a symbol dictating the type of auction it triggers. This is crucial because on your turn, you’ll select a card from your hand and put it up for one of five types of auctions.

• Open Auction: Classic bidding war. Players shout out bids until the auctioneer calls going, going, gone!
• One Offer Auction: Players get a single chance to bid in turn order. You either raise the offer or pass.
• Hidden Auction: Everyone secretly submits a bid in a closed hand. On the count of three, hands open, and the highest bidder wins.
• Fixed Price Auction: The auctioneer sets a price, and players (in turn order) decide if they’re going to buy it or pass.
• Double Auction: The seller offers two paintings by the same artist, a great way to earn some extra money, push up an artist’s popularity, or create a surprise ending to the round.

Auctions continue until one artist has their fifth painting sold, triggering the end of the round. Only the three most popular artists of the round (the ones with the most paintings auctioned) will have their works sold. The most popular artist’s paintings go for $30,000 each, the second $20,000, and the third for $10,000. Any paintings from artists outside the top three? Worthless.

After counting your hard-earned cash, the next round begins. The auction rules remain the same, but the value of the artwork changes. If an artist was among the top three in the previous round, their paintings retain their value and stack with new payouts.

After five rounds, each one building on the last, the player who could literally fill a bathtub with cash (or at least money tokens), wins.

The art of the (shady) deal

Playing Modern Art felt a lot like watching Mr. Brainwash’s meteoric rise in Exit Through the Gift Shop all over again. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an excellent documentary that dissects the modern art world—how reputation and hype, rather than artistic talent or emotional depth, dictate value.

Now whether Modern Art intentionally critiques this phenomenon I’m not sure, but it absolutely captures it. Because while the artwork on the cards is stunning, by mid-game, what’s on the card hardly matters. All that matters is how much you can sell it for at the end of the round.

And that end-of-round speculation? Absolutely wonderful.

Puzzling out which artists will become popular, which won’t, and how much to pay for each art piece on auction to make a profit is as delightful as it is challenging to get right. It’s part gut instinct, part hard math.

You know what cards are in your hand and how you can manipulate the market, but you also know the exact payout you’ll get for each piece won. So every bid becomes a calculated gamble.

Of course, none of that thinking matters when a master auctioneer is at the table.

Modern Art leans into its theme with an easel to display paintings and a gavel to add a dramatic flair to each ending auction. When players use these props to ham it up, either by turning into a sleazy auctioneer hyping their “priceless masterpiece” or the bidder bluffing their way into a steal, the game goes from great to incredible. But like any great social game, the more energy you put in, the more fun you get out. And nothing beats the sheer joy of conning your friends into a terrible deal.

That said, after a few back-to-back games, the theatrics naturally took a backseat. A picture is worth a thousand words, but once you’ve said them all, there’s not much left to add. Players shifted from fast-talking dealmakers to cold-blooded strategists, focusing more on bidding tactics and money management than putting on a show.

Which, honestly? I didn’t mind. There’s more than enough depth to keep you engaged without having to be the greatest showman every time.

Bidding, bluffing, and the best of the best

One of the things I loved about Modern Art is how it puts you in the shoes of a high-stakes art dealer. Every round, I found myself debating—should I cash in on a well-established artist for some quick money, or take a gamble on a fresh face and disrupt the market? It genuinely felt like I was “discovering” new artists, and sometimes, that was the best way to scoop up undervalued paintings on the cheap.

Another highlight was the variety of auctions. The more I play auction games, the more I despise straight open auctions. They’re fun, but there’s a limit to how many I can stand, as they drag on forever and stretch out the game unnecessarily. Modern Art still includes them, but also mixes in quicker, more dynamic auction styles to keep things moving.

Vault Wars tried something similar, but that game left a sour taste in my mouth. It had multiple auction types too, but every time a new one came up, players had to stop and learn what to do. Modern Art avoids this by sticking to five distinct, easy-to-remember auction styles—so you get all the variety without the constant rule-checking.

Alright, now for the big question: between Ra, Medici, and Modern Art, which is the best? For me, Medici is a clear third place. But Ra vs. Modern Art? That’s a tougher call. Ra’s push-your-luck element and scarab-based bidding make it a blast, while Modern Art stays truer to its auction roots and offers deeper strategy.

Ultimately, while all three are excellent auction games and have their own unique flavour, I think I have to give the edge to Modern Art. It’s easily one of the best—if not the best—pure auction games on the market.