For reasons we've yet to fathom, the roles that players take on in this picture association party game are anthropomorphised animals. From round to round players alternate between acting as gallery curators and artists but, inexplicably, the curators are portrayed as cats and the artists as owls.
Belratti is a cooperative game designed by Michael Loth for 3-8 players. While the players adopt their feline and avian roles, they are collectively trying to beat the art forger who gives the game its name and who is portrayed, inevitably, as a rat, tho' apparently the name is actually a corruption of Beltracchi: Wolfgang Beltracchi was a prolific German art forger.
The game is played with a massive deck of cards, each of which shows an everyday object: all with clear art from Vipin Alex Jacob, Gaël Lannurien and Natàlia Romero. Players each have a hand of cards, tho' it's only when you have an artist role that you make use of your cards. Two cards are flipped from the top of the deck. These represent themes which the artists' cards should reflect. The curators specify how many cards the artists should submit (minimum 2; maximum 7). The artists then decide which cards they'll submit from their hand to contribute to the total specified by the curators. Artists can't show each other the cards in their hand but you can say, for example, 'I have one card that's a very good match and one that's a bit of stretch'. Once the artists have proferred (face down) the requisite number of cards, four are added at random from the draw pile and shuffled in with those of the artists. The random cards represent Belratti's attempts at forgery...
The shuffled cards are then examined by the curators and they decide which cards were submitted by the artists. If they deduce or guess correctly, they add to the players' collective score for every card that's assigned to the correct subject card. For any card they choose that was not submitted by the artists, Belratti is deemed to have snuck a forgery into the gallery. Rounds continue in this way until Belratti manages to get six forgeries into the gallery.
There's a bit more to it, in that there are some special action tiles that artists and curators can call on to help them. These are single use, except that in the the event of a perfect round (ie: all the artist cards being correctly assigned) you may be able to reclaim a tile for reactivation in a subsequent round.
Belratti is a light picture association game that's very much in the tradition of Dixit (Libellud), Pictures (PD-Verlag) and Ensemble (Ares Games). It's a lot of fun, especially with five or more players. We especially like the way the roles are moved each round. It can be frustrating of course when Belratti's randomly added cards turn out to tie in exceptionally well with the target cards but you'll find that players soon appreciate how they adjust to each other's thought processes so that everyone gets 'better' at besting Belratti as the game as the rounds progress.
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