Theme: Art

You are buying artwork for your museum, always trying to meet the current trends and finding genuine art from your associates. But the famous Belratti is trying to cheat his own fake paintings into your collection.

In Belratti, players are split into two roles — buyers and painters — and are playing against the game. The game presents two cards as topics for which the buyers need to buy paintings. They ask for a certain number of cards, and the painters have to collectively meet this target number.

The painters select cards from their hands they think will fit the most to one of the topics. Then additional cards are added as Belratti's fakes. All cards are shuffled upside down, then flipped up. The buyers then have to select all the cards from the painters, not the fake cards by Belratti.

The roles change after each round. If too many fakes are bought, the players lose.

(The name of the game is obviously derived from the name of the German art forger W. Beltracchi)

Buying and selling paintings can be a very lucrative business. Five different artists have produced a bunch of paintings, and it's the player's task to be both the buyer and the seller, hopefully making a profit in both roles. He does this by putting a painting from his hand up for auction each turn. He gets the money if some other player buys it, but must pay the bank if he buys it for himself. After each round, paintings are valued by the number of paintings of that type that were sold. The broker with the most cash after four rounds is the winner.

Part of the Knizia auction trilogy.

Welcome back to the palace of Sintra! King Manuel I has commissioned the best garden designers of Portugal to construct the most extraordinary garden for his wife, Queen Maria of Aragon.

In Azul: Queen's Garden, players are tasked with arranging a magnificent garden for the King's lovely wife by arranging beautiful plants, trees, and ornamental features.

Using an innovative drafting mechanism, the signature of the Azul series, players must carefully select colorful tiles to decorate their garden. Only the most incredible garden designers will flourish and win the Queen's blessing.

—description from the publisher

In Mandala Stones, you use artists to collect colorful stones in towers that you then score.

To set up the game, randomly place the 96 stones — 24 each in four colors and 48 each in two patterns — on the main board in stacks of four. Place the four artist pillars in their starting locations among these stone stacks.

On a turn, you either pick stones or score stones. To pick, move an artist to a new location, then collect all stones adjacent to this artist that (1) bear the same pattern as that artist and (2) are not adjacent to another artist. Choose one of these stones to be first in a tower, then stack the other collected stones on top of this foundation one in clockwise order, then place this tower on an empty space on your player board.

To score, choose to remove either (1) a color that appears on the top stones of at least two towers on your player board or (2) any number of top stones on your player board. In the latter case, you score 1 point for each removed stone. In the former case, you score points for each removed stone depending on the scoring condition for that space on your player board, which might be based on the height of that stone in a tower or the number of colors in that tower or the height of all towers on your board. Place all removed stones on the shared central mandala, building from the inside out and possibly scoring points depending on the spaces that you cover.

If a player can neither pick nor score OR if a stone placed on the central mandala covers the game-ending space based on the number of players in the game, complete the round so that everyone has the same number of turns. Each player can then score one of two secret objective cards in their hand, then the player with the most points wins.

In The Princes of Florence, players attract artists and scholars to their palace while trying to become the most prestigious family in Florence.

Over seven rounds, players attempt to score points in various ways, with most points being earned by playing profession cards to generate "work points", which can be exchanged for money or victory points. The game includes a variety of professions, such astronomers, organists, and architects; each profession is attracted to a particular combination of building, landscape feature, and social freedom, and players acquire these items via auctions. The more that a player can match these preferences, the more work points they earn — but the minimum requirement of work points increases each round, and you must meet that threshold in order to convert the work points.