Base price: $20 for the standard, $29 for the Kickstarter edition.
2 – 5 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG | Board Game Atlas
Check it out on Kickstarter!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Avant Carde was provided by Resonym. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Working through some more previews! I enjoy that I keep saying I’m going to slowly transition off of previews for a while and then I end up in this situation. Thankfully, I’ve got plenty of time between now and the preview dates. I have less time between now and moving, but you know, that’s also life as well. It’s a thing. That said, we’re plugging away, so let’s plug away! This time it’s Avant Carde, from Resonym! Let’s check it out!
In Avant Carde, players are art collectors of impeccable taste. And what’s the point of art if you can’t show it off? You’ll do your best to impress and amaze, as your goal is to earn awards. Again, you gotta be fancy art collectors. Patrons are fairly easily impressed, and with their wealth and influence, you’ll be able to do even more. So gather your art, dazzle some rich people, and make it all work. Will you be able to earn the most awards?
Contents
Setup
So the setup for this game is wild. Essentially, you just unroll stuff. There are three deck boxes:
Unrolling the Starter Deck box gives you five starter decks, one for each player:
They each have 1s, 2s, and 11 – 12 – 13 – 14. The colors on the corners of the cards indicate which colors are most common in each starter deck. Then, you can unroll the Gallery box:
And unroll the Patron box, setting it above the Gallery box, like so:
Set aside the Change Tokens:
Move some of the Awards to the Extra Awards pile, have each player take a Starter Deck and shuffle it, and give a player the Starting Player token. Set aside the Hidden Gem token:
Have each player draw 7 cards and you should be ready to start!
Gameplay
A game of Avant Carde is played over a series of rounds as players work to earn Awards for their impressive art collection. Each round, players simultaneously Play Cards and then, in turn order, Buy Cards.
How you play cards is interesting. Everyone plays simultaneously, and your goal is to play as many cards as you can. You can play the first card without any problems, but the next card has to be either the same color or the same value as the previously-played card. Cards of certain values may have Patron abilities associated with them; After everyone has played as many cards as they’d like, move on to the Buy Cards phase!
As mentioned, each card you play is worth $1. If you have a Change Token or the Hidden Gem, they’re each worth $1. Depending on the Patrons you use, you might also gain $1 if you play the most 2s. Now, in turn order, players can buy cards! Each player may bury a card once during the Buy Phase, putting a card in the stack of their choice at the bottom of its stack. Otherwise, each card’s cost is equal to its value and you can buy as many cards as you can afford. Place any cards you buy into your discard pile.
When you’re tallying the money you made for the turn, you can also earn Awards! You earn them based on the total amount of money you earned (including if you spend a Change token):
- $6: 1 Award
- $8: 2 Awards
- $10: 3 Awards
- $11: 4 Awards
- +$6: +1 Award
If you don’t spend all your money and you don’t have a Change token, you can spend the rest of your unspent money and gain one! Note that you can’t gain a Change token if you had one this turn. Once everyone has taken a turn, the round ends! The player with the fewest awards gets the Hidden Gem token and the First Player token passes to the left. Each player draws 7 cards from their deck. If you run out of cards in your deck, shuffle your discard pile; that’s your new deck. Then keep drawing. For a simpler deckbuilding experience, you can just have players shuffle their discard pile, deck, and hand together to make a new deck and draw 7 cards.
When the Awards run out, the game is over! Continue the Buy Cards phase until every player has had a chance to buy cards and get Awards (players can pull from the Extra Awards). Once every player has done so, the game ends, and the player with the most Awards wins!
Player Count Differences
The only major difference with player count is how the market works. As you might know from numerous reviews here at What’s Eric Playing?, I’m not the biggest fan of random markets. With more players, there’s more chaos, and you can’t necessarily predict what cards are going to be available on your turn. That said, here, it’s not too bad. The individual cards are pretty much the same (only differing by color), so most of the difference is just getting what color you need. In Avant Carde, players can bury cards, placing them on the bottom of their respective stack. So you might notice some cycling happening a lot at higher player counts. Otherwise, no major player count differences!
Strategy
- You probably want to go deep in this game, rather than wide. Deep in terms of color combinations, not in terms of numbers. You really want to stick to 1 – 2 colors, if you can, since that gives you the best odds of being able to play your entire hand every turn. The more you dilute your deck with other colors, the more they’ll pop up and interrupt long plays and make it harder for you to pull the big awards.
- Make use of that bury action to cycle cards around in their stacks. You can use burying to benefit yourself or hurt your opponents. See they’re buying a lot of blue cards? You can bury the blue card on top of the stack and leave them high and dry. Not seeing a card you want? Bury the top card of the stack and see if you can end up with something a bit more useful.
- Keep an eye on what your opponents are buying. You should know what colors they’re going after (so that you can bury them). You also don’t really want to be competing with an opponent for a color; that just hurts you both.
- Your goal should be to try and consistently hit $10 every turn. It’s relatively doable without particularly good luck if you have some cards that earn you extra money, and you get three awards for landing it.
- Trashing your 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 is strictly a good idea. The only thing they give you is another card in a color. That may be helpful, but otherwise getting rid of the colors you’re not focusing on means that you have a higher concentration in your deck of the colors you do want.
- Cards that let you change their number or color can help you effectively string together combos. They improve your flexibility, which is critical to keeping your play going. The more cards you play, the more money you make and the more awards you get. Therefore, cards that help you play more cards are strictly beneficial. I tend to like these high-flexibility cards, personally.
- Don’t forget about the little things! Your Change token, the Hidden Gem, and getting the most 2s played (or other card effects) can be the difference between an extra award and not. It depends on which Patrons you’re playing with, but there are often a lot of small things that can add up to get you cards you want or awards you need. Keep them all in mind! Little things add up quickly in this game.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Y’all are going to love how this game is stored; it’s impeccable. Basically, everything comes in these little boxes that just roll out into a usable play area. I haven’t seen anything like it, but I love it. It also makes the game really easy to put away afterwards.
- A surprisingly straightforward deckbuilder with a fairly novel concept? In this economy? I was very impressed by how approachable this game is. Deckbuilders can be a bit hit or miss on approachability (mostly in that there are a wide range of complexities when it comes to deckbuilding games), so seeing a new one that’s firmly hitting a casual-to-strategy games audience is nice.
- I like the art style a lot! It’s very cubism. Very cubism. I think. I don’t actually know much about art; my only art history was Spanish 5 in high school, so I know a decent bit about El Greco and Picasso’s Guernica. I guess that second one is cubism.
- I particularly like how streamlined the concept of the Patrons is; it essentially gives you the modularity of Dominion’s Kingdom Cards without requiring a ton of extra printing, since you just overload the values with their effects. It keeps things relatively easy in that there’s one place you can look for all the information and you don’t have to print new cards with new effects; you just need a new list of what those effects are. I like it a lot!
- I appreciate that the rulebook specifically mentions for new players that you should go after 1 – 2 colors. It’s nice to have rulebooks include some bonus strategy tips! Plus, it’s a benefit for the person reading the rulebook. They don’t have to tell anyone.
- I also like that there’s a simplified deckbuilding rule set with the game; improves approachability at a minimal strategic cost. I am positive there’s some level of strategic depth lost by shuffling your deck and discard pile together every turn (since new, high-utility cards can skip having to wait and get shuffled straight into your hand), but I think for players new to deckbuilding that … doesn’t really matter. I appreciate a lower-complexity rule variant in a rulebook.
Mehs
- The major problem with the game is that you can’t really put all of the cards in the center; they need to be on one end of the play area with players on the other so everyone can read the text. It’s the directionality of how the Patron set is printed; you don’t really want to play a game with it in the center. Otherwise, one player is very much stuck reading upside down, which, from experience, is not ideal.
- Deckbuilders with asymmetrical card backs is one of my Type A pet peeves. I can’t help it! I like all my card backs to be facing the same way. If they’re symmetrical, I don’t have to worry about it. If they’re not, I’m going to notice and then spend time fixing them every time I shuffle.
Cons
- It’s not entirely clear how to display the Awards such that every player can count them; I understand why they’re cards, but I definitely wish they were tokens instead. You can splay them a bit, but it’s still not that easy to see. The problem is that you need to know every turn so that one player can take the Hidden Gem (and it helps from a strategizing perspective). Having them be tokens would make it much easier to scan and see who has the most and who has the least, but I understand that having them be cards makes it much easier to make the game fit into its rollable boxes.
- There’s not much to do about this, but it is hard not to look at what your opponent is doing while you’re planning your turn. A player looking to circumvent polite gameplay could wait a bit until others have made their decisions about what to play to decide whether they want to draw a card or gain $1 for certain cards, for instance, since you can see what other players are doing. It’s not a big enough deal that it should be fixed; it’s just something that like, if you have a player doing that, tell them to cut it out.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, Avant Carde is a neat one! I was a bit surprised given the theme that the actual deckbuilder is pretty abstract (you’re just trying to get as many cards played per turn as you can), but the simplicity and elegance of the core game works out really well! It makes the game really easy to learn. I appreciate that they went for an interesting style of modularity that I haven’t seen before. Here, all the cards have numbers, and you have a separate row that explains the powers of all of those numbers, so you can just swap that out for something else if you want to try a new mix of effects. It does lead to some minor confusion during the game since you may read the wrong number by mistake, but generally it’s a neat thing. It has similar vibes to the Kingdom Cards in Dominion, but without being card-specific. Each set in Avant Carde is themed and has some built-in synergies (and expansion potential). It’s hard to talk about Avant Carde without talking about the coolest part, which is that all the bundles roll out to reveal the cards already set and essentially ready to play, making setup and teardown (often the annoying part of deckbuilding games) very easy. Plus it’s cool to roll out an entire deckbuilder. That’s just how things work. I do like the art style of the game, but I wish the card backs were symmetric; as you might know from reading I’m a skosh type-A, so that kind of thing irritates me. The other thing I’d love to see is a different / recommended way to display Awards. It’s good to know how many your opponents have, but right now they’re just cards in a stack. You need to know every round for the Hidden Gem token, so making it easier to determine would go a long way. I’ll be interested to see what the final version looks like (and what additional Patron sets make it into the game; I’ve seen a few so far). If you’re looking for a novel spin on deckbuilding, you like abstract / cubist art, or you are a pro at making consecutive sequences of cards with the same color or value, you’ll probably enjoy Avant Card! I had a lot of fun playing it.
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