From distant galaxies and places where zombie kitties roam, today’s special takes us into a slightly more serious realm. We will look at the Museum Pictura board game, which turns the player into a museum curator. The following lines will tell you how it all works in practice.
- Number of players: 2-4
- Game time: 90-120 minutes
- Price: 1269 CZK (Thlam Games)
- Credit: Asmodee Blackfire
- Age: 10+
Collect dream collections at Museum Pictura
The dream of every museum curator is to bring to his museum as many collections and paintings by famous masters as possible. And in Museum Pictura you can realize something similar, because you will be offered exactly 180 paintings with which you can work. The player who entered one of the art booths last will start. On his turn, he can take two picture cards into his hand. You can choose from two categories.
One of them is the theme. Each painting belongs to one of the six themes it presents to the world. You are offered works dedicated to history, religion, mythology, still lifes, portraits or landscapes. The picture in the upper right corner, which always says clearly, determines which category the picture belongs to. However, you will not select cards based on this parameter alone. The second component, according to which the selection is carried out here, is the historical period.
Not all paintings in the Pictura Museum date from the 20th century. Some pieces were created in the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romantic or Impressionist styles. Each format usually clearly shows which historical era it belongs to, because they contain aspects that are clearly characteristic of this direction. Impressionism is represented here by Manet in particular, while Rococo is represented by the work of Hogarth and many other prominent artists.
Prestigious games at the Pictura prim museum
Your priority is to generate prestige points, and you get them with cards. On their turn, each player draws two cards from the painting deck and is then forced to exchange one piece for a painting in one of the four international museums. An exchange is a trade from which you can profit or lose. Whether you benefit from an image is primarily determined by what the trends are. If a work of art is among the most desirable, it will automatically cost you something to acquire it, if, on the other hand, it is not currently attractive to the world, you will gain prestige by acquiring it. Therefore, it is necessary to realize what images you really want for yourself.
After completing this stage, you have the option to perform one of four actions. You can upgrade your museum by adding a new image card to it and discarding one to the discard pile. You need to properly position the images, because only with the right connection will you be able to get the most out of them. Ideally, one image should go into two collections at once, which will bring you more points. In addition to improving the place where you store your paintings, you can open temporary exhibitions, through which you present your temporary collections to the world and subsequently receive their value in prestige points.
If you’re unhappy with the contents of your current deck, it’s a good idea to take an inventory action when you draw a new deck and draw another favor card. In addition to these three actions, there is also a Free Action in which you can play, for example, the already mentioned favor card, or get a patron, but certain conditions must always be met to approach him. As for the assessment itself, it depends on the form of the collections, trend maps representing the interests of experts, the number of temporary exhibitions, how the main gallery is doing, and also on how much you fill your museum. Conversely, a discarded pack has a negative effect on you. The more pieces you have, the more points you lose. The game ends after reaching 50 prestige points. The winner, of course, is the one with the most points.
Under certain circumstances, this would be a perfectly “ordinary” name. However, there are visually stunning maps representing the work of master painters from all over the world and from different historical stages. For example, I was captivated by the Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch, whose painting The Last Judgment or Haystack was something incredible. Pieter Brueghel with his “The Murder of the Innocents” is also interesting at this stage. I was fascinated by the rococo landscapes of Giovanni Antonio Canaletto and the religious paintings of Sebastian Ricci. All in all, I have to say that this game really expanded my horizons in terms of art, and it’s definitely something that can have an educational effect on young players, which could theoretically lead to drawing.
The Museum Pictura board is definitely not for everyone
Museum Pictura is definitely not one of the board games for a really wide range of players. It seems to me that the opposite is true. The game mechanics really get under the skin really fast, but the theme of the paintings is definitely not something that would draw a crowd, which is actually understandable, since the art itself is of course not a matter of attracting a crowd most of the time, but is often meant for groups looking for beauty in details or thinking about the motives of the author who created the creation before them.
However, I consider Museum Pictura a unique piece that definitely has a lot to offer. That is, first of all, for the target group, consisting of art lovers who are close to board games. Here they will find both entertainment and the opportunity to see again the wonderful creations of artists of different generations. For other groups, this piece may be a way to get to know a really wide range of painting, but I’m not sure it has enough power to absorb them as much as the aforementioned lovers of fine brushstrokes and oil paintings.
Source :Indian TV
