Belratti Review

Is it art or can it go? That’s for you to determine as you play Belratti, a game for three to seven players ages 8 and up. 

The game includes 192 painting cards, seven character cards, one Belratti card, five Jokers, and five paint brush tokens. The number of character cards and cards in each player’s hand will depend on how many players you have. Players work together as a team to identify the fake paintings by master forger Belratti so that they don’t end up in Dr. Cat’s museum.  

The players playing as Dr. Cat will start a round by laying out two paintings from the draw pile to serve as themes. Those players then determine how many painting cards to request from the players playing as Owl, the painter. They can request between three and seven paintings. While the Owl players cannot talk about what is specifically in their hands, they can discuss how many paintings each of them will contribute in order to meet the requirement from the Dr. Cat players. The goal is to choose paintings from your hand that fit the themes from the two paintings. Once the painters have played their cards face down, four paintings are randomly drawn from the Belratti deck and shuffled in with the painters’ cards. Next, all the paintings are revealed, and the museum directors try to correctly assign the paintings to the two theme cards. Their goal is to guess which paintings came from the painters and which were Belratti’s fakes. Once the directors have made their guesses, the painters show which paintings belonged to them. The entire team gets one point for each painting assigned to the appropriate theme card. If a painting was assigned incorrectly, no point is scored. Belratti receives one point for each forgery assigned to a theme card. 

Before starting the next round, character cards get passed to the left so that everyone gets a turn as Dr. Cat and Owl. Continue playing until there are six or more paintings on the Belratti card at the end of a round. Count up how many paintings are in the team pile (each counts as one point), and if you have reached 15 points or more, you win and have defeated Belratti. 

The game has additional pieces that can change up the gameplay, such as Joker cards that can be played by either Dr. Cat or Owl players. These cards swap theme cards, ask the painters about an image, change the number of Belratti forgeries, change the required number of paintings, and cause players to swap cards. And the paint brush tokens can be used if you want to play a faster version of the game.