A Fake Artist Goes to New York: My Favorite Game Mechanism

Jamey describes his favorite aspects of one of his favorite games, A Fake Artist Goes to New York.

[skysplawn]

I printed out a slip of paper with the translation of what the pad says on the top part. It is designed to record all the relevant info.. who won, who the fake artist was and what the clue was. I love going thru the old drawings. Accumulating them along with the memories is one of my favorite things about this game.

[ashleepradella]

Thanks for the video review Jamey! Telestrations and spyfall are 2 of my favorite games so I'll definitely need to check this one out. I really love the name too haha :D

[fiddlerjones]

I'd never heard of this one - looks like a blast though. My first thought was that it reminded me of Spyfall, which didn't really click with me for whatever reason. I am a big fan of Telestrations/Eat Poop You Cat, however, and the combination works so well.

I think the freedom of using any word you want is what sets this above Spyfall for me. It does run the risk of alienating someone with an obscure reference, but it also lets your group play with the things that interest them. Besides, if you drop something too obscure, you risk a false positive when a real artist just doesn't know what to draw. Definitely going to have to give this one a try.

[jeremi]

Got this one last year still sitting on shelf as my game group is 4 people :( want to play this one so bad

[Avelice]

Neat game, thanks for sharing! I love Spyfall so I think that I'd love this too. Something that I think these do really well is giving that sense of paranoia of finding the liar, without putting too much pressure on the liar. Mostly because there's only 1 liar each game, so it's unlikely any person gets picked very often. This is why my girlfriend enjoys Spyfall, even though the Spy in that game is extremely stressful for her. I like that in this game being the fake artist looks pretty low risk and very accessible to all audiences.

You mentioned the push and pull of trying to give enough information, but not too much--I think this is a really great mechanism. Effectively any game that really has you trying to strike a fine balance is very engaging in my opinion. I was only come up with one other example besides Spyfall which has this same feeling, which is Dixit. Dixit's whole game actually is around this concept--trying to make sure some people understand you, but not everyone. I think this is very tough to integrate into games because the balance needs to be just perfect, and you also need to have the right type of game for it.

Component-wise, I love the use of the mini-whiteboards and many different colored markers here. I'd love to see some more strategy oriented games use these types of pieces. I've been interested in trying out St. Malo for just this reason. It seems like there could be a lot of interesting design space in letting people draw things.

[natefrank]

I was surprised to hear that you tried adding it to your collection despite it being so outside the Euro genre. It is a unique little evergreen game that’s easy to pick-up and have a lot of fun with right away, so I can understand. I just bought it to play with my coworkers at lunch. Thanks for the recommendation!

Is there a common term for when a mechanic is the game itself yet? I think 2019 will be a big year for weird games that will be harder to categorize by mechanic as they start to explore more unconventional component/mechanic interactions. If not let’s coin one?

[ArtByDesign]

So if you take the concept and scrap paper and can play this game for FREE.

[twoplusgames]

So it's Spyfall with artist tomfoolery :) Cool! Only thing is that it's more setup-heavy than Spyfall. Also, one player has to "sit out"?