First of all the box: 290x220mm which is about 11.4×8.7inch. I love the yellow and the black! I hope you feel me.

 

 

And the back:

 

 

I tried to fit a 3 players setup within the edges of my yellow background boards (the long edge is 700mm or 27.5inches): MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

 

 

Since Mr. S.C.Rheber requires a secret rule that can change during the game, a component was created such that it is possible to write and erase on it with a felt-tip pen, but that the written part does not remain in contact with the table. The Gallerist Board is therefore a screen with a dual function, i.e. to hide the secret rule and to create a corner of privacy while the Gallerist writes the solutions behind the Masterpieces of all the players.

 

On the other side, visible to all Collectors players is printed the cunning face of the Gallerist Herman Homer.

 

 

For those in need of inspiration to invent the Secret Rule, the Artistic Manifesto Deck contains 100 preset rules. At the moment the prototype contains the 100 logic puzzles invented by Soviet computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard (which I have already mentioned in a previous update). In Mr. S.C.Rheber’s Gamefound version the rules printed on those cards will be replaced by rules never seen before: many of Bongard’s puzzles need considerable optimisation in order not to confuse the most inexperienced Gallerists.

 

 

Obviously, speaking of a freehand sketch classification game, the number of experiments one needs to do is much higher than in a normal Pattern Recognition game (while playing, you start to empathize with those AI models and the large dataset that they require to be trained on): a lot of slips of paper, dry-erase markers and a system of multi-pocketed transparent-folders to organise them, called ‘Museum Folders’. Those are the only components that Albin from Game Prototyper didn’t make:

I actually had to buy some off-the-shelf suff from Amazon. In Mr. S.C.Rheber’s Gamefound version, the Museum Folder and the coloured paper pads will be custom-made.

 

In this case I setup the Red Collector:

 

 

We come to my favourite component: the Collector Board and Guessing Sheet. These two components are the brainchild of two playtesters (thank you Lisandro, thank you Fabio!) on how to organise one of the biggest crossword quizzes in the history of board games. In a game of Mr. S.C.Rheber a large number of experiments are needed, and with about an average of 20 drawings per player, in a game with 6 collectors we could talk, depending on the level of difficulty set at the beginning of the game, about 30-100 drawings to be guessed. This is a questionnaire of a whopping 60-200 questions (REMINDER FROM THE VIDEO ABOVE: each drawing has to be guessed 2 times). Their idea was the use of a transparent folder for diapositives (the Museum Folder) to keep the drawings well organised in a grid and a transparent sheet having grids printed on where is possible to write the guesses associated to each of the drawings: since the Gallerist writes the solutions on the back of the drawings to keep it secret, it is possible, by turning over both the Guessing Sheet and the Museum Folder, to check one by one whether or not the solutions reported in the latter correspond to the answers given in the former.

 

Here are the Collector Boards seen from the outside (each representing one of the 6 Collectors and its respective museum)

 

 

And one Collector Board (the Purple Collector, alias The Philanthropist) seen from the inside, attached with a metal clip to a Guessing Sheet (visible on the right page)

 

 

This is how a Guessing Sheet looks like (is compatible with dry-erase markers, so that the ink won’t go off game after games):

 

 

Finally, the two main boards: the larger one (called the Forger Board) to mark the players’ points, the smaller one (called the Turn Tracker Board), on the other hand, will be used by the Gallerist to give clues to the players and keep track of the drawing turns.

 

 

And, of course, the tokens to be used in combination of the aforementioned boards (in the prototype the laser cut has blackened the print a little: the Gamefound version of the game will not have this defect)