SNAP Review – Belratti

What makes good art? Is it entirely subjective, or are there objective standards for beauty and worth?

You’re going WAY too deep into this. This week we just need to know which paintings fit a theme and what ones, don’t.

Oh, is that all?

This is a SNAP review for Belratti.

Game

Belratti is a cooperative deduction game for 3-7 players ages 8 and up, designed by Michael Loth. This version is published by KOSMOS, and the box says it takes about 25 minutes to play.

Art

So, if this game is all about art, what’s the art like in the game?

This game is pretty much all cards. The character cards show anthropomorphic animals: Dr. Cat, Painter Owl, and Belratti the forger – with full background art to help set the scene of a studio and an art museum.

The 192 painting cards are the bulk of the game. The card backs look like the back of a canvas, and the front of each shows a single item in great detail – anything from a chef’s hat to a snowglobe. These items have no context, it’s just one thing on an otherwise blank canvas.

There are a few cardboard Joker tiles too. These show either the owl or the cat with an icon representing some special action.

Mechanics

So, that’s it, that’s the art. What are the mechanics of Belratti: how do we actually play this game?

The whole group is going to try to group painting cards and avoid the forgeries that are introduced by Belratti.

Start by distributing a number of painting cards to each player to have in their hand. Then pass out character cards – roughly half the group should get Dr. Cat the museum director, then the other half gets Owl the painter. You’ll pass these to the left after each round, so players should get a chance to be both characters several times.

At the beginning of a round, the museum directors pull the top two cards from the deck – these will be the “themes” for the art show. They discuss and determine how many cards they want the painters to contribute to the show: this has to be a number between 3 and 7.

Then the painters will select which of their cards they want to contribute. They are not allowed to look at each other’s hands or give specific information about their cards. But they can say things like “I have a picture that fits perfectly, and I could contribute another one that’s just OK.” or they could say things like, “I got nothing.”

As a painter contributes a face-down card, they should decide in their head which of the two themes to assign it to – but they can’t tell anyone yet! Together, the painters contribute the required number of cards, all face-down.

Before moving on to the next phase, Belratti contributes forgeries to try to smuggle them into the museum! Draw four cards from the deck and shuffle them together with the painters’ contributions.

Now the museum directors flip over the shuffled paintings and try to determine which cards belong with which of the two themes. They are allowed to talk about possible motivations or why an object fits – or why it might be a forgery – but the painters are not allowed to participate or give hints.

Once the museum director team has finalized their decisions, the painters take turns showing which paintings are theirs.

For every painting placed in the correct theme, the whole team is going to get a point. Set these cards aside to count points at the end of the game.

Paintings that the directors assigned to the wrong theme earn nothing. Discard those.

And, sadly, if any of the “forged” paintings got assigned to a theme, those are points to Belratti! If he has six or more cards in his pile, the game is over.

Otherwise, when the round is over, put the themes on the discard pile and pass the character cards. Play another round and see how many paintings you can collect before Belratti sneaks too many forgeries in!

There is one more element to this game: Jokers. These are special powers that the Painters or the Museum Directors can use to make a round slightly easier. You flip them face-down after using them to show they can’t be used again.

It IS possible to re-activate a Joker, but only if you have a perfect round where none of Belratti’s forgeries were selected and all of the paintings were put in the right categories.

Expectations

What did we expect from this game?

When I first saw this, I was thinking about was games like Dixit, with art following themes – it’s all about art – and someone trying to maybe guess how they were all related. I was kind of right, but not really.

I was not at all excited for Belratti. I don’t know what it was about this game, but I just wasn’t looking forward to doing deduction and trying to guess what fits and what doesn’t. With themes that nobody knew ahead of time.

Surprises

But there were some surprises. What surprised you about it?

We had a great time with Belratti once we figured out the roles of “painter” and “museum director”. I particularly loved when people on the “director” team would TALK through their reasoning of WHY an object belonged in one category or the other and had arguments about it.

Honestly that made it feel a lot like Similo, which is a simpler cooperative deduction game that we love.

It’s interesting that this game feels like Similo to you, because for me, this game screams cooperative deduction. We reviewed Caution Signs last week, and this game feels incredibly similar. It also takes elements from games like So Clover, for all of the same reasons.

I love that here, you’re kind of dividing the group in half every round, but everyone is still working towards the same goal. I also love how the teams are changing all the time with shifting roles – kind of like the older game Concept.

The shifting roles are especially good, because the roles feel a little lopsided. The Painters are pretty much all working individually, since they’re not allowed to discuss anything, while the museum directors work as a team and ONLY make decisions together.

When you’re on the Painter team, you’re just as unsure as the directors are about which painting goes where (if it’s not yours).

I also think we wouldn’t really want to play with three players. When you do that, you only get a single Painter character and they have an enormous hand of cards. While that might feel more fair than trying to agree with a team of people whose cards you can’t see and can’t have any information about… it also puts a ton of pressure on the Painter each round – and on the Directors to get into that one Painter’s head and understand their “vision” for the two themes.

Recommended?

Ok, so that was a lot. So based on that, do we recommend Belratti?

I think we tentatively recommend it. It’s a cooperative game that really depends on getting on the same wavelength as your fellow players, and that can be polarizing. But if you’ve enjoyed games like Similo or Wavelength or The Game, Belratti will be a fun way to mix up your game night – with at least four players.

We give Belratti 3 ½ paintings out of 5.

And that’s Belratti, in a SNAP!

Find Belratti on Amazon, direct from KOSMOS, or at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Belratti from KOSMOS for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?