Base price: $15.
3 – 7 players.
Play time: ~25 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Belratti was provided by KOSMOS.
Alright, another micro review! I haven’t done one of these in a quick second, and they’re always pretty fun. Belratti’s been out for an age or so, but it just got picked back up for a re-release from KOSMOS, so let’s try it out and see how it goes! I still have a bunch of writing to do this week, but Civ VII came out and now I’ve become largely useless. So it goes.
In Belratti, players team up as both artists (The Owl) and curators (Dr. Cat) to try and get paintings into the museum matching a theme! Each round, the Cats reveal two random cards to be the painting themes, and then name a number of paintings that they want. The Owls submit that many paintings between the ones they have in hand. Easy enough. The problem is the name of the game: the great art forger, Belratti! He wants to get his forgeries into the museum as well, so he shuffles four paintings from the deck into the submitted pile and now there’s an issue. The Cats, without consulting the Owls, have to decide what they’re keeping (based on the themes) and which card goes with which theme! If they’re right they get points, if they’re wrong about the themes it’s just kind of neutral, but if they keep Belratti’s paintings, he gets points! How many can you earn before Belratti gets seven paintings?
Overall: 7.5 / 10
Overall, I think Belratti is a great party game! It’s tough, don’t get me wrong, but a cooperative party game being tough is part of the fun. I appreciate that the goal is simple and that the game’s concept is simple, too: you just want to provide cards that fit the provided categories so well that it’s obvious (and your partners want to guess them). Categorization games are fun. The challenge, of course, is that Belratti’s random forgeries can usually throw a wrench in your gears. Since the cards that are added to the player-submitted cards each round are random, they can potentially be near-perfect matches for the category or hilariously off-base. It makes for a bit of luck and challenge since you can never be too sure that a card is from the players and not Belratti, as a result. I like that fundamental tension. I also appreciate that you can use jokers or adjust the difficulty as players need to really make the game your own.
I’m also really glad that KOSMOS picked this back up! I was worried once it had kind of faded into the ether that it wasn’t coming back, ever, and I liked this game and was hoping to get a chance to own it. I was a little saddened to see that they updated the art so that the Owl no longer looks blazed out of his mind, though Belratti still looks like some kind of criminal. Financial crimes? Probably not, but who’s to say? He looks like he makes toilet wine, honestly. Everyone needs a hobby. It would have been kind of fun if they had kept the frames on the cards from the old version, but you know, it’s always going to be some changes with a new version.
All of this is to say that Belratti is another party / group game that I quite enjoy. It’s puzzle and a bit silly, but there’s a good challenge to it despite the initial simplicity. I’m not particularly a big party game person, just because there’s so much performance inherent to a lot of them, but I like these categorization games and word games and cooperative games. High portability (a staple of these KOSMOS games) also helps! I can bring this, The Crew, and The Gang wherever I go, and I frequently do! A nice smattering of options in relatively easy-to-transport boxes. But if you’re looking for a clever party game, you enjoy the highfalutin world of art and art criticism, or you just really like the drawing of Belratti, you’ll probably enjoy the game Belratti as well! I think it’s a hoot.
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