Designer: Vital Lacerda

Live the life of a pretentious artistic tastemaker, discovering new talent and then ruthlessly exploiting their creative drive and quest for fame for your own profit and glory.

The Gallerist is a game that manages to both be dizzying complex and yet offers a surprisingly constrained set of choices to the player. You will have your own art gallery. Running it, you will need to acquire new art, advertise to lure the masses in, discover and foster new talent, and compete on the international market.

Much like the same designer’s previous work Kanban, the Gallerist is a complicated board. While there are only 8 actions you can take on any given turn, each one may have three or four subcomponent actions you need to remember to do. Also, the International Market is the least interesting part of the game, but is one of the highest scoring. The game would be served better by making this feel less tacked on. Still, if you like dense Eurogames, this is a good one.

Interesting mechanic: Assistant Actions. There are a couple of mechanics that I like about this game, but one of the most intriguing is the worker placement. When you move your worker, you can leave an assistant behind on the old spot. Your assistant doesn’t block other players from moving there, and in fact, they can go where your pawn is. However, if anyone does, you can pay a small fee to take that action as well. In a full game, this results in a lot of free actions, and figuring out how to get these free actions (or ensuring that you deny those free actions to certain players) is a key part of the strategy of the game.

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(Photo Credit: An essen report for boardgamegeek)