The appeal of word association games is that the outcome of the game depends on who you are playing with and how the other players make associations. Verlatti! Here’s the latest from Thames & Cosmos: 3-7 players work together to choose paintings for an exhibition at a museum, but the director must identify the forgery by Berlatti (based on the real-life German forger W. Beltracchi).
This new version, first released in 2018, has updated art and pieces and is a lot of fun. It’s easy to see why people love this game. It combines visual interpretation, limited communication, and creative guesswork into a quick, compact, replayable party game that gamers of all levels can enjoy, including kids. This version also has a Masterpiece variant, which adds another element. Verlatti!
What’s in the box?
Verlatti! It’s entirely card-based: 200 cards (192 picture cards, 4 museum directors, 3 painters, and 1 Berlatti card), 5 joker pieces, 5 brush tokens, and a rulebook make up the entire game, and with the cards at your fingertips it’s easy to carry and easy to set up. teeth The game board. As always, the production of Thames and Cosmos is fantastic, the cards are smooth, easy to hold and easy to shuffle. The print quality of all the cards – items, painters, museum directors and Berlatti – is fantastic and it’s great to see how much variety there is of items.
A nice touch is the embossed ladder on the top of the box and partially embossed Berlatti, adding a slight 3D element.
How is it when you play it?
Players receive 18, 9, or 6 cards depending on the number of players (3, 4-5, and 6-7, respectively) and split into two teams: the Painters and the Museum Director. At the start of each round, the Museum Director (alternating with the Painters) presents two painting cards to set a theme for the upcoming museum exhibition and requests 3-7 paintings that match the theme. The Museum Director cannot discuss the theme or say anything else; he or she can only request the number of paintings he or she wants.
The artists then choose the card from the deck that best fits their theme and place it face down. Four more cards are secretly added – fakes by notorious art forger Berlatti. Museum directors must guess which of the cards the artists have submitted to their exhibitions are fakes.
To add difficulty to the game, the artists cannot talk about the cards they have, only that they have a certain number of cards that could fit into the two themes. This means that a player can say “I have two pictures that match, and if that’s not enough, I have a third”, but they cannot say “I have three pictures that match the same color”.
Once the artists have placed their cards, the art directors work together to decide which of the placed paintings should be exhibited and which are fakes.
For each correct drawing, the team receives a point. Drawings that are assigned to the incorrect theme card but are not fakes receive no points and are discarded. Berlatti receives a point for each fake that is assigned to a theme card.
The round continues with players discarding two Theme Cards, adding a picture from the deck to their hand, and moving one Character Card to the left, then the new Director repeats the process and the game continues until either six more pictures are placed on the Verlatti Card or one of the teams has scored 15 points or more.
Each round, players can also use one of five jokers, which allow the Art Director to swap out a theme card, ask a painter if one of the paintings on display is their choice, allow Berlatti to smuggle one less fake, allow a painter to increase or decrease the number of paintings they need, or allow all painters to discard cards from their hands and draw new cards.
If a team plays a perfect round in which all cards are properly assigned, they can collect any jokers that have already been used.
Finally, there is a game variation called “Masterpiece,” which plays a maximum of five rounds and only requires you to win three rounds, except that the jokers are face down, making it harder to get help, and you can only play a number of cards once per game, based on the brush you choose each round.
What’s the verdict?
To be honest, before I played BerlatiI wasn’t really sure if I would like it. I love art themed games and I thought it was an interesting premise, but upon reading it I didn’t immediately think it would be the most fun. I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong! It’s so silly and simple, but so much fun deciphering what on earth the artists came up with to match the theme cards.
At one point, the theme cards were a microphone and a couch. While it was easy to find a card to match the latter piece of furniture, I struggled to choose a card for Mike and chose a silver item. Unfortunately, that didn’t get through to the other players and I ended up getting my first Berlatti counterfeit in the first round.
I also like how the card designs have been redesigned to just be items. The cards no longer have frames around the edges, but now feel like ultra-modern art (the frame is now only on the back of the card). It’s more traditional (not a bad thing!), but the designs feel a bit “older”. I like how the character designs have been updated too.
You can pick it up Verlatti! You can purchase it directly from Thames and Kosmos, from Amazon, or at your local FLGS for $14.95.
Images and review copy courtesy of Thames and Kosmos
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