The Great Art Race

The Great Art Race (originally Vermeer 2) is the final entry in the Vermeer resource management/simulation series. While it might seem dated and unremarkable at first glance, the game has its own charm and is surprisingly fun. I remember playing Vermeer 1 and Die Hanse on the Amiga, both from the same developer. In this installment, you compete to inherit your dying uncle’s fortune by recovering his lost artwork, scattered across museums post-WWI. Starting with limited funds, you build plantations, sell goods, and generate wealth through various means to buy paintings at auctions. You also take courses to avoid forgeries. The game offers local multiplayer and AI opponents with varying difficulty levels. There's no manual or tutorial, but the game is easy to learn. For those unfamiliar with this type of resource management game, checking out a few YouTube videos may be helpful. In the end, the niece or nephew with the most assets after two years claims the inheritance.

No combat. just a nice game about trade and art. been playing this for years as a relax infront of the telly game

Great management sim from the early '00s. Easy to get into (although you'll need to read the included manual) and a lot of fun to play. There are too many other games available for me to spend too much time on it, but I'd be happy to stumble across it again in future.

Nice game, unfortunately it does not run on steam deck. :(

Great game of economic management. You are competing (racing) against your 4 cousins, which can be either human or A.I. players, travelling the world repeatedly to buy the most paintings before your Uncle Walter dies in two years. My first game, 2 years of game time was equal to about 6 hours of real time. There is a catch, in that some of these paintings are forgeries, so you have to take art classes in order to have the knowledge to pick out the real paintings at the auctions. You also have to gain favor with Uncle Walter by visiting him occasionally, and gain reputation with the high-society crowd by going to events like horse races, parties, and art raffles.

You earn the money to buy these paintings, and pay for your travels, by building plantations and then upgrading them to increase production of commodities like coffee, silk, and tobacco. When you get a ton of extra cash, you can incite riots on your cousins' plantations to cause chaos and hire away their workers for yourself. You can also gain wealth by trading stocks and buying hotels. It's challenging to find the right balance, as the player with the most money doesn't win. The player who bought the most paintings wins.

This is a very old game. First review of it on Steam was in May of 2011, and it feels way older than that. The graphics are thus quite primitive by today's standards, but were very passable by the standards of yesteryear. There's tons of hours of replayability here, and there's many variables which can happen in the game which will make it different every time you play. When I first looked at the Store Page, the description wasn't very descriptive at all. Actually one of the vaguest descriptions I've ever seen. But the game was on sale for less than a dollar, so I thought I'd take a chance. I'm very glad I did, as I feel this game is very underrated. A game manual can be found in one of your Steam folders after the game is installed.

Oh goody, a game about art collecting I was thinking. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that a) there's no tutorial at all, and that b) rather than being about collecting and learning about art... it's actually about managing labor and wagering on commodities and stocks. How did I find this out? Well, I tried playing for a while just to see and the incredibly counter intuitive game a) allows one to cheat rng by exiting to menu and reentering the game, b) allows new players to squander huge amounts of money on art appreciation lessons, c) spams the players with historical facts that have absolutely no bearing on game play (literally you can freely travel from Berlin to London in the middle of the first world war) and d) has hidden the manual in a pdf in the game folder. Why this wasn't instituted as part of the game code so you could read it in the game I don't know. I also don't know why the maker of the game thought "Hey, I'll give a starting walkthrough in the manual instead of making a tutorial" but they did.

And it's not like the age of the game is an excuse. I remember games from 2004 and earlier than had tutorials or tool tips. All in all, if I want to glorify the colonial plantation system, I'll play Puerto Rico or Archipelago.

Recommendation: a fun game with a classic feel and some pace issues that may have you lose track of time.

Review: The Great Art Race is a modern game from 2009 that often feels like a game from 1985...which is OK for me, as I enjoyed many games of that era. In the game, you have five siblings; each is a player (live person or AI bot) competing for the favor of their fabulously wealthy and elderly uncle. He made his wealth through various nefarious but socially-acceptable-in-the-19th-century means, but he fancies himself a man of culture and refinement. With his bottomless wealth, he has taken up a hobby of collecting fine art: masterpiece paintings, specifically. His pride and joy is a complete collection of Vermeer paintings. As the game begins, someone has stolen all of the Vermeers. So the uncle summons his nieces and nephews and gives them a quest: recover his lost paintings. The sibling who supplies the most art will then inherit all of the gentleman's wealth when he passes away. He gives each feckless youth (including you, the player(s)) some seed money and sends them on their way.

The game is both morally and ethically ambiguous, in a way not dissimilar to the classic board game, Puerto Rico. In order to proceed in the game, you have to make obscene amounts of money. The primary way you do this is by exploiting cheap labor around the world to harvest/manufacture goods to sell in the global markets of New York and London: you create and operate plantations. These produce one of give commodities: cacao, coffee, silk, tea, and tobacco. Once you create a plantation, you pay to hire workers for the plantation, and they produce a certain amount of the commodity each day. Those commodities are stored in a local warehouse; you need to visit each warehouse in person to direct the shipment of the goods to one of the two markets: New York or London. Then you have to travel to those markets and sell the goods that have arrived there (*). Travel in the early 20th century is by railroad and ship, so it's much slower than you might expect.

You can also invest in the stock market: there are five mutual funds in the game which will earn you money very fast (in a day or two, as opposed to a week or more with shipping goods)...if you can manage to buy low and sell high.

But money is not the point of the game: having the most money does not mean you will win. Rather, money is a necessary tool that you need to employ wisely to bid on artworks at auction in order to deliver the most paintings to your uncle. Paintings are all that matter for your score in the base game, though you can play with the "assets" goal option selected, in which case properties, curios, and paintings are all valued (with weight heavily on the paintings) to determine the winner when the geezer dies. Even in that case, money doesn't count toward the win: just the stuff you buy with it.

* - There is an important exception: you can sign a contract to deliver X number of goods to a market on a particular date. Once a contract is signed, that amount of your goods will be sold automatically as long as they have been shipped and received in the relevant city. By mid-game, this is how I was earning most of the profit in my trading empire, as contracts tend to pay significantly more than the market rate.

Critique: The game has a lot in common with classic 4X games: competing with other players, you travel, you buy and deliver goods, you upgrade your infrastructure (instead of upgrading planets, you upgrade plantations), you participate in occasional story events, and you attack those other players (albeit less directly than typical 4X fleet combats: here you poach workers from your competitors' plantations, leaving them with no production capacity and setting them back financially). It's interesting to think of this game that way; I suppose it's possible to aggressively seek to exterminate the other players - bankrupting them so they can't compete with you - but it didn't occur to me in my playthrough. Creating an engine for multiplying wealth from the various money-making mechanisms in the game was engaging enough for me that I rarely felt like I had to worry about the competition enough to sabotage them.

The biggest frustration I have with this game is the pace: every day (turn) plays out in real-time as if all five players are humans, even if you are playing solo against four bot siblings. There is a LOT of waiting in the game: every day that you are not actively trading or in an auction, you watch while the other players take their turns. You have to wait for your plantations to produce goods, you have to wait while traveling, you have to wait if you take any classes, you have to wait for your goods to travel, you have to wait for contract dates to arrive, you have to wait for auction dates to arrive, etc. So the 1P game takes much longer than it feels like it should.

I have one other, much more minor, issue with the game. When you set out on a ship or a train, you cannot refer to your reports, which just seems arbitrarily punitive. One should be able to read the stock news or the reports about the other siblings while in transit; one certainly could in the real life of 1918!

But overall I really enjoyed this game, even though I haven't figured out how to do very well at it. The engine-building aspect (creating and shipping goods enough to make continuous profit) is really engaging, even if it isn't the point of the game. You have to balance your enthusiasm with building your empire against hunting down and acquiring paintings. Because you don't know how long you have - your uncle can die at literally any time, and when he does, the game ends - you should never stop trying to acquire paintings. But getting the paintings feels a great deal more like "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" than the 4X mechanics of the rest of the game. There's a fair amount of deduction, and some guesswork, to find genuine paintings and not forgeries.

The end result is something that feels like a good boardgame: some competition between players with very minimal ability to fight your opponents directly, and winning results from a combination of smart play and good luck.

It's kinda old game, but I still recommend it just for the fact that it has hot-seat multiplayer and it's really good, I enjoyed it in the past a lot :D, playing this game alone is bad to be honest.

I will recommend it for $1. It simply isn’t worth more.

The game offers very fun mechanics of economy and management. And even though it lacks depth, the pitfall is that while offering solid mechanisms in plantation management and trading, it for some reason concentrates on getting paintings. I would welcome this game more warmly if it did the reverse and offered masterpiece-hunting as a secondary mechanic – not the main focus of the game.

Also, the game lacks a tutorial and tooltips / info of functions, and it becomes repetitive very fast.

If you like something similar but deeper and better made (also – well aged) look into Patrician 3.

Simple, old-skool game that's surprisingly enjoyable!

I've played this game twice already in two sittings.

It's a "schedule-management" game with a relatively forgiving resource management as well.

One fair warning: There is no in-game tutorial. A thorough reading of the (included) manual is *necessary*.

10/10 would buy Vico Vermeer's high-quality forgeries again :-)

Tags: Tycoon&Simulator&Sim&City
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library

TLDR: An attempt at casualizing the hotspot trading genre in a more streamlined, topical and thematic board style game. However the result is an akward excecise in indirect interactivity, unclear mechanics, high learning curve and confusing objectives delivered through some odd uncle storyline and the odd random event where you get fleeced at poker.

The great art race uses standard calendar functionalities as core gameplay. A dozen hotspots located in the western world are peppered about the map and art related events seem to be alternating from hotspot to hotspot based on a predetermined schedule. This game seems to be about being at the right place at the right time. Unfortunately being in any hotspot summon a small slideshow clicker adventure game front end as a user interface to interact with any visiting attraction and it seems that clicking any of the wrong button at the wrong time results in the character spending time waiting until said attraction come. Resulting in the game processing turn after turn and the playing snoring noises, moving the events about the overland map until you are finally permitted to interact with the game again, make another misclick and start the snoring all over again. Gets old real fast.

Compatibility

First of all, I ran this remake on a Win10 PC with a NVIDIA GTX 745, and neither did I have problems starting the game nor did it crash once during my 2 hours (short) playthrough.

Remake nostalgia

I enjoyed it very much. During the late 80s, I played the original Vermeer on my Schneider CPC6128. I was pleasantly surprised about this rejuvenated version, its neat graphics, the nicely executed intro and the stylish background music (one for each city you can travel to). Everyone who shares my aforementioned experience with the original should have a fresh look. Gamers who do not have this predisposition for nostalgia might find the game a little simplistic, but it feels quite relaxing nevertheless.

Gameplay

The goal is to collect famous paintings to please your wealthy uncle, competing with some of your relatives (AI or hotseat multiplayer) for his inheritance. Most of those pieces of art are bought in auction houses all over Europe and the USA, and in order to do that, you need to earn money as a planter in Asia, Africa and the Americas, grow five different crops (tea, coffee, cacao, tobacco as well as silk) and sell them on commodity markets in London and New York. Forward contracts with higher profits, stock exchange, special events and expeditions to exotic places spice up this routine between simple economic simulation and educational collect quest. During the short game, it did not become boring. I am not sure how it would feel to play the long version in one session though.

I did not encounter any bugs. It seemed a little confusing at first when the amount of my available funds was automatically increased or decreased (when I ran into debt, the game decided for me that I needed to take a higher bank loan), and the rules what you can and cannot buy when your cash runs out are a little arbitrary (crop transfer yes, plantation upgrades no, worker wages yes, expeditions no...) - coming from the original game where you could not even buy a train ticket without a positive cash balance, I understand that the developers of the remake wanted to avoid the (formerly common) situation that the player got stuck in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a random money gift from your uncle for travel expenses.

I cannot write this review without mentioning the beautiful replicas of the paintings and their informative descriptions you can read by inspecting them. I love it when a game has some real-life educational value in addition to the good entertainment.

Verdict

The original classic has been modernized and presented in a very appealing way. The game is stable, and it is not expensive. I give it a 7.5/10 and recommend it to Vermeer veterans, friends of the simulation genre who want to try something not too complicated, and to culture vultures who appreciate the art theme.

The Great Art Race is an old game that is only available in a package. While flawed in some aspects, it is well worth grabbing if you are into management games. Specifically for this one, time management.

The players are the family of the wealthy art collector, explorer, and general high society member Uncle Walter. There are two problems, however. Firstly, your uncle is old. He is nearing the end of his life and is looking for an heir to his fortune. Secondly, his prized art collection has been stolen. All the paintings have gone missing, and are popping up at auctions.
He thusly decided that the one to bring back the most of his precious collection would be his heir.

This means it is up to you, and up to 4 other family members to get back those paintings. In order to get them you will need to start plantations, get yourself a fortune by producing up to five different crops and selling them in either London or New York. Prices fluctuate, and there are orders placed in advance you can fill for more profit. You can buy shares in the companies who transport these goods, and you can pay your opponent's workers to strike and stop working.
Aside from the economic things going on, you have a reputation to uphold. Explore the jungles, adventure in Asia, and bring back fancy figurines and other such interesting things. Bet on horse races, and of course spend time with your uncle before the end.
And all of this while still making your way to auctions and having the money needed to buy the paintings.

Paintings that could be forgeries. You can luckily take art classes to identify these(A PDF is included with the game, you will need it to check what is real and what is not), at which point you can bid up the price of a forgery if your opponents don't know it is one to make them lose out on money, or you can just let them outbid eachother for millions of dollars on what you know is a fake.
The gameplay is mainly about time management, rather than managing your business. Travel across the world is faster than in the age of sail, but it still takes several days to travel anywhere. And that adds up. You can only personally tell your warehouse to ship goods, so you need to be in India to send goods from there to London. And you can only personally pay your workers, but if you don't pay, they stop working. It is all about managing your time, and making sure you are in the right place at the right time while still having enough money to do what you need to do.

The greatest of flaws, aside from its age locking it at a smaller resolution than most screens and potentially making it difficult to get it working on some computers, is the multiplayer.
By which I mean, the AI are not too great at the game, and the only multiplayer is local multiplayer.
It would be a much more enjoyable game if it were one that could be played with friends over the internet.

As it is, The Great Art Race is an interesting, somewhat hidden game that is quick to play and finish (About an hour per ingame year), satisfying to get through, and yet leaves you wanting more of it. Assuming of course you can look past the small flaws and slight inconsistencies out there.

What an interesting little gem of a game this is.

I had my eyes on Patrician III, as it was well reviewed was on sale for less then a dollar. Then I see it comes in a bundle with two other games. This one, The Great Art Race, perked my interest a bit. Only in a bundle? Not for sale on it's own? It can't be that good then.

My mistake completely.

What we have here is an extremely solid resource management/board game. Essentially you play as one of five nephews/nieces to a rich uncle, who is terminally ill and wishes one of you to inherit his fortune. The condition? Become insanely wealth and then use said wealth to attend art auctions in hopes of finding and retrieving his stolen artwork. And how does someone become insanely wealthy? By travelling to smaller cities like Bombay, Guatemala, Mexico City and Saint Louis, among others, and buying up land for plantations and hiring workers.

There's a pattern to the game. You visit your plantations and pay your workers, ship the goods to London or New York for sale, go to one of those cities to sell them at the market value or sign future dated contracts to sell them at a higher price, and then when all that is done you can find an auction to attend. No auctions? Maybe you can attend an activity for the exclusive social club you're all members of. Horse racing to bet on? Maybe take an expensive expedition in a foreign land in hopes of finding something valuable? Maybe visit your uncle and get drunk with him, or help him re-arrange his salon? This all raises your reputation which can result in you getting a bonus paining at the end of the year.

Maybe you can attend an art class to determine if a painting is real or fake (basically allowing you to make sense of the included decoder file)

There are two game modes. The main one tasks you with locating the most paintings, with bonuses for all paintings of a series and for the aforementioned bonus paintings. The other tasks you with just having the most assets, with paintings adding to your overall value. Each one can be played against any combination of computer players or human players via hotseat. You can also set the difficulty, and set the length of the game to 2, 5, or 7 years.

There's a fair bit of depth here. It's quite fun all in all, even on your own. The music for the cities is catchy, and the colorful graphics and sound effects make it a pleasant audio and visual experience. Having not played either Darkstar One or Patrician III (the other games in the bundle) yet I cannot comment on them but The Great Art Race is so enjoyable it alone is worth the cost of the bundle.

A completely unknown game that me and my mate decided to play one evening, which ended up being an entire weekend.

It's a confused game that is part whodunnit, part resource / trading sim, part art lesson, but it's handled well and if you're willing to take it on with an open mind you can get some genuine fun out of it.

This is a resource management game where you have to meet certain goals by deadlines whilst carefully watching your and your opponents' money and assets. If you enjoy gameplay similar to East India Company (minus the warfare aspect), then you will probably enjoy this game. Personally, not for me, but don't let my opinion spoil it for you. **

This is a resource management game in which you try to inherit your rich Uncle's fortune by retrieving his stolen art collection. Along the way you'll build up a global plantation empire, invest in stocks and hotels, participate in art auctions, and (of course!) sabotage your rivals.

For a game that was released in 2009 the graphics are very underwhelming. But graphics aren't everything, and I'll play anything as long as it has an interesting premise. This game's premise of being one of the wealthy elite during the Roaring Twenties appealed to me so I gave it a try.

Unfortunately there are some flaws that cause this game to fail.

Firstly, there is no in-game tutorial so I had to go hunting for the manual which I eventually found hidden in one of my steam directories. You really need to read the manual before starting the game, otherwise you won't have a clue how to get started.

Secondly and most importantly, there are game-stopping bugs. I was running Windows 7 64 bit and had random crashes. I once made it two years into the game but then I got a crash that I couldn't avoid even using the auto-save, so that was it for me.

It's a shame, there's 95% of a game here, if they could have just done some more polish it could have been a decent resource management game. But since it came out in 2009 it's doubtful these bugs will be fixed, so I have to give it a thumbs down until further notice.

The Great Art Race is a light, simple, short, and casual strategy game. Once you develop a system for creating cash and being punctual to the auctions, it will be an almost effortless win even on the more advanced difficulty setting. There are some randomized events, but they will not effect the outcome very much. The graphics and presentation are not impressive at all, to say the least. There is very little animation, and minimal sound. It is fun for about two hours or so, keeping in mind there won't be very much of a replay value. Once you're done (and you'll be done quickly), there's not much to go back to. It somehow reminds me of a less fun Jones in the Fast Lane from the early 90s. I played for about 2 hours, and I plan on keeping it installed for the time being, just in case I feel like playing a quick "coffee break" game.

The Great Art Race is okay.

Fun, interesting, a mix of developing plantations in different parts of the world with saving to buy paintings, while gambling stocks or betting on horses.
It has short to long games, so you can choose what you want and get an end game.

A remake of the classic C64 game Vermeer. So not a board game and should not be confused for one....

By building plantations with different crops you're trying to create enough wealth to get the best art collection. To make things intresting there's stock trading, an auction where you try to buy the paintings and scripted events from the historic timeline(early 20th century) that affect markets. For the paintings you also have the option of studying art directions so you can spot fakes. Or to raise price for your competitors who might not even realise what you're doing... Good fun.