I have a regular group of fellows that I play board games with every Wednesday night. After work, dinner, and kids are mostly in bed, we gather at one of our houses around 7pm, and play until 9 or 10. This means that our usual games are the ones that we can teach and play within 3 hours. That said, we’ve all been board game fans for over 10 years, we all enjoy games that are more complex in nature. The downside is that some of our biggest games don’t see the light of day because we’re a bit nervous to break out a big game on a weekend game night.
Enter The Gallerist, designed by Vital Lacerda, and published by Eagle-Gryphon Games in 2015 following a successful crowdfunding campaign. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about Vital Lacerda games before, but as a board game designer, he’s quite prolific. All of his games are these big, complex boxes of interconnected mechanisms that require a thorough studying in order to understand and comprehend. In the past I’ve played two other games of his, 2014’s Kanban and 2019’s Escape Plan, both were similar in that they required more than a weekend game night to get through.
Players in The Gallerist take on the roles of gallery owners, and must discover artists, commission and display works of art, promote the artists, then sell those works of art to make a profit. The goal of The Gallerist is to make the most money, but the path forward is not always clear.
It shouldn’t be difficult to play The Gallerist. On your turn, you take a single executive action (which can be one of two options), then move your pawn to one of the four locations (if someone is already there, bump them out and they get a kicked-out action after your turn is done), and take one of the two actions at that location. A total of 8 possible location actions in the whole game. It can’t be that difficult to learn just 8 actions, can it? It turns out, Vital Lacerda’s games are like clockwork. Every mechanism, each action turns a gear, which influences everything else in the game. It’s not enough to know how to do each action, what’s important when playing The Gallerist is that you understand why and when you want to do each of the actions for maximum benefit.
The devil is in the details when it comes to these 8 actions, but thankfully the included player reference cards are verbose and cover the major points of every action, making them invaluable to learning players. I’m not going to go into detail about all 8 actions, this review is not intended to teach you how to play The Gallerist, after all.
In preparation for game night, I watched Rodney Smith’s excellent Watch it Played video, and then read the rule book, which made me feel fairly well-prepared, although during the process I felt like I was crunching for an exam. My wife came out as I was pouring over the rule book and asked, “Is this fun for you?”. And the truth is, yeah, I really do enjoy learning how to play Lacerda games. As you process each mechanism, each action space, as you peel back one more layer of the onion, slowly the shape of the whole comes into focus. Thematically, things mostly make sense, and the thematic integration assists with learning how to play. When you sell an artwork, one of the people in your gallery leaves with the painting. Little details like that make sense and help me retain the rules to this complex game, and made the gameplay feel a lot smoother than many games of a similar complexity.
I remember reading once that some designers design mechanics first. Their early prototypes are plain cards with numbers, and the game is just manipulating numbers. Theme comes afterwards. I doubt this is the case for Vital Lacerda, as the theme and the mechanisms are often so well tied together. I feel like he gets inspiration from the theme that informs the mechanics of the game he wants to create. It’s something I really appreciate about his work, and it’s something worth highlighting here.
Talking about The Gallerist specifically, gosh, I’m bad at this game. I don’t know how or where I go wrong, but golly do I ever flounder. I fall behind at buying artworks, which means I don’t have the money to buy more artworks, and I fail during the end game scoring. I never seem to have the right guests in my lobby so I’m shut out of the influence actions that inform another large aspect of the end game scoring. But I do have fun. It’s fascinating seeing all these mechanics work together, and the main board is tightly packed with action spaces that you’re going to constantly rub elbows with your opponents, which is to your benefit, as getting kicked out of a space awards you a benefit.
I’ve talked about positive player interaction before, and I quite enjoyed it here as well. Getting bumped out of an action spot awards you with an extra action. No one owns the artists, so buying their works of art and promoting them benefits everyone. A rising tide lifts all ships, after all. The point of The Gallerist isn’t to step on each other’s necks, but to be the player that excels. The most ‘feel-bad’ part of the game is when you drag a visitor kicking and screaming out of an opponent’s lobby and into your own, but that’s it. The kick-out mechanism has an added bonus of making the time between your main turns feel a lot shorter, as you may be gifted a bonus action during someone else’s turn. I quite appreciated that aspect.
I find myself wanting to replay The Gallerist again and again, mostly to see if I can figure out where I’m going wrong. So many of the mechanics have players looking at the thing they want to do, and work backwards through all the steps they need to do in order to make their plan happen. It’s a satisfying puzzle, and one that has me interested and intrigued, even if I’m awful at it.
The Gallerist is a big, well produced game. It looks gorgeous on the table, and the components are high quality, even judging by today’s standards. The puzzle is solid and engaging, and I can’t really find any place to truly fault it. I’m not a Lacerda fan-boy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have reverence for his craft. A Lacerda game has a certain, specific quality to it. When you play one of his games, you know what kind of experience you’re going to have. Part of me really appreciates when a designer has a specific flavour, that I know what I’m getting into when their game hits my table, but at the same time, I wonder how many Lacerda games I need in my life. It’s been too long since I played with Kanban or Escape Plan, and I’d gladly play them again at any request. But if someone asked me what Lacerda game I wanted to play, The Gallerist is sitting right at the top of my chart.
