The draw of word association games is that depending on who you’re playing with, the way the other players make associations make or break the game, and that’s the case in Belratti! in an update from Thames and Kosmos. Three to seven players cooperate to pick paintings for an upcoming museum exhibit, but the directors have to identify the forgeries by Belratti! (Based on an actual German forger, W. Beltracchi.)
Originally published in 2018, the new version has updated art and pieces and was a lot of fun! I can see why people love playing it! It combines visual interpretation, limited communication, and creative guessing into a quick, compact, replayable party game for gamers of all skill levels, including kids! This version also has a masterpiece variant adding another element to Belratti!
What’s in the box?
Belratti! is entirely card based. 200 cards (192 picture cards, 4 museum directors, 3 painters, and 1 Belratti card), 5 joker pieces, 5 brush tokens, and a rulebook make up the entire game, making it super portable and easy to set up since the cards are the gameboard. As always, the production for Thames and Kosmos is great, the are cards sleek, easy to hold, and shuffle. The print quality on all the cards for both the items and the painters, museum directors, and Belratti is great, and it is a lot of fun to see just how many different item types there are.
A nice touch is the embossed ladder and partly embossed Belratti on the top of the box adding a slight 3D element.
How’s it play?
Players receive 18, 9, or 6 cards depending on the number of players (3, 4-5, 6-7 respectively) and are are divided into two teams, painters and museum directors. At the start of each round, the museum directors (who will switch with the painters) present two painting cards to set a theme for the upcoming museum exhibition and ask for 3 to 7 paintings to match the themes. The directors cannot discuss the theme or say anything else, just the number of paintings they want.
Painters then choose picture cards from their decks that best align with the theme and place them face down. Four additional cards are secretly added to the deck – these represent fraudulent pieces from the infamous art forger, Belratti! The museum directors must guess which picture cards the painters have submitted for the exhibition and which are forgeries.
Adding a challenge to the game is that the painters also cannot discuss the cards that they have, just that they have a certain number of cards that might apply to the two themes. So a player can say “I have two pictures that fit, maybe a third if you don’t have enough” but not “I have three paintings that fit the same color.”
Once the painters place their cards, the art directors work together to decide which of the placed paintings are meant to be in the exhibit, and which ones are the forgeries.
For every correct painting, the team gets a point. Paintings assigned to the wrong theme card but aren’t forgeries receive no points and are discarded. Belratti receives a point for each forgery assigned to a theme card.
Rounds continue with the two theme cards being discarded, players top up their hands with paintings from the draw pile, and then the character cards are moved one player to the left. Now the new directors repeat the same steps, and the game continues until there are 6 more paintings on the Belratti card OR one of the teams has 15 points or more.
Each round, players can also use one of the five jokers, which allow one of the following to happen: the art directors can replace theme cards or ask the painters if a single picture on display is one that they chose, Belratti smuggles one less forgery, the painters can increase or reduce the required number of paintings, or all painters can discard cards from their hand and draw new ones.
Jokers that have already been used can be retrieved if the team plays a perfect round where all cards are properly assigned.
Finally, there’s a game variant called “Masterpieces” where you play a maximum of 5 rounds and only need to win three. However, the jokers are face down and harder to get help from, and you can only play a number of cards once per game based on the brush picked each round.
The verdict?
I’ll be honest and say that before playing Belratti, I wasn’t sure how much I would really like it. I love art themed games and thought it was an interesting premise, but it didn’t immediately read as the most fun ever. I’m pleasantly surprised to be wrong! It’s so silly and simple, yet such a delight trying to decipher what the heck associations the painters picked to match the theme cards.
At one point, the theme cards were a microphone and a couch. It was easy to find cards to match furniture for the latter, but I struggled picking cards from my hand for the microphone and went with silver items. Unfortunately that did not come across to the other players, and we got our first Belratti forgery in the first round!
I also love that the cards were redesigned to just have the item, which feels super modern art instead of having frames around the edge of the cards (frames are only on the back of the card now). It’s more traditional (not a bad thing!) but made the design feel “older,” and I loved the updated design of the characters too!
You can pick up Belratti! from Thames and Kosmos directly, Amazon, or at your FLGS for $14.95!
Images and review copy courtesy of Thames and Kosmos
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