Review: CANVAS

Victory is in the eye of the beholder!

~~~Game Stats~~~

~Publisher: Road to Infamy Games / GateOnGames
~Designer: Jeff Chin / Andrew Nerger
~Artists: Luan Huynh
~Players: 1-5
~Sweet Spot: 3-4
~Mechanics: Card Drafting / Abstract Strategy / Hand Management / Set Collection

!!!Find it on Kickstarter now!!!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/roadtoinfamy/canvas-reflections

Art is certainly subjective, its individual appeal relying on personal taste and preference. Something art does best is bring people together for an experience. Canvas takes this concept and distils it down into one of the best games we’ve played in a long time. Exploding at the seams with color and imagination, Canvas is simple, quick, and thought provoking. Like paint on a masterpiece, layer upon layer of fun and creativity are combined, bringing the inner artist out of us all!

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~THOUGHTS~

Lizzy: What… the hell… is that?

Kitty: What???

Brooks: Yeah… what is that, Kitty?

Kitty: What? It’s beautiful and meaningful!

Lizzy: Seriously, Kitty? Rainbow teeth… eating dishes… behind a fence? What exactly is the meaning behind that?

Kitty: It’s a metaphor for housewives trapped within conventional domesticity… so basically Betty Draper!

Brooks: Riiiiiight… I totally see it! And honestly, that’s the best part of Canvas. Few games offer such a smorgasbord of creativity while maintaining the underpinnings of complex strategy, but Canvas does this effortlessly.

Lizzy: Exactly! We are massive fans of painting games, so the second we spotted this on Kickstarter (art themed… card layering like Mystic Vale… serious strategy… um, all-in pledge please!) we knew it would be gracing our table regularly. And it didn’t disappoint! Canvas also blends various mechanics together to create a smoothie of scoring possibilities and fun! Do you specialize in one type of icon or do you desire more symmetry? When you’re desperately low on pallets (which allow you to skip cards in the queue) do you take that first art card with 3 pallets on it even though its icons aren’t useful to you? Canvas certainly breathes life into a genre that can seem mechanically stale at times.

Kitty: Yes, and speaking of stale, something art games tend to blatantly lean on is the set-collection mechanism of gathering paint to complete works of art. This can be seen in some of our favorite games like Starving Artist, Pastiche, and Atelier. What Canvas does instead is offer transparent art cards that can be layered to create a painting that scores with pre-selected criteria. This mechanic throttles artistry to the forefront, while maintaining a level of deep strategy correlating to how adeptly you layer your art cards. For me, it deconstructs the theme down to the bare bones of creation, which is brilliantly immersive for a game about artistry!

Brooks: That’s so true, Kitty. And you would think a game like this where you’re layering cards and creating pretty paintings would be super light and fluffy, but fluffy it is not! Canvas actually has some teeth (and not just the ones Kitty painted). The goal cards provided are numerous and varied, some of which are synergistic while some are nearly incompatible with each other. This makes every game strategically unique, forcing you to decide where to direct your focus, or flip your strategy halfway through.

Kitty: I kept picturing the objectives as pushy commissioners; telling you what to commercially produce, all while you try to maintain your original vision!

Lizzy: When it comes to component quality, Canvas doesn’t skimp in the slightest. The basic cardboard components are thick and high quality, while the deluxe ones are wooden. Card art is varied and provides a bottomless well of creative opportunities. So happy that themes such as pride and revolution were included. Art is always a reflection of society, so it was wonderful to see such important topics be a part of such a great game. Also, the box is a beautiful slipcase with an actual hangar on the back so that it can be displayed on the wall like an actual painting. This is a genius detail, and one that shows a lot of love was put into design!

Kitty: Honestly, with Canvas, we can’t think of anything bad to say. I suppose if you were a hardcore 4X gamer or something, you may not like it, but it just felt so accessible and so perfectly balanced. We had so much fun just coming up with ridiculous meanings for our paintings that at times it felt like a party game. Now we even give out best and worst artist awards depending on what was produced. And we love it so much we even created our own expansion for it!

Lizzy: Yaaas! The LDG expansion… find it exclusively in a living room near you… as long as that living room is ours…

Brooks: Hah! So true! We felt that the background cards were prime real estate that was being wasted. So Lizzette had the brilliant idea to ascribe variable point values to the paint splotches on each background card. These values reasonably correspond to the color scheme of each one. Therefore, each card has one 3 pointer, two secondary 2 pointers, and two tertiary 1 pointers. Any splotch left uncovered on a finalized painting would then result in scoring those extra points. We also named all the background cards to add to the flavor!

Kitty: That was a game in and of itself! And every part of this game makes you feel like an artist the whole way through. To quote Sondheim’s ‘Sunday in the Park With George’: “bit by bit, putting it together… small amounts, adding up to make a work of art!”

Lizzy: For remote play, it was an absolute breeze. We both have a copy, so I simply separated my art cards into stacks, organized by the two colors present on each. Then, when Brooksby and Kitty would fill the queue, they would just state: color, color, and word (eg: Green, Blue, Pride). Also, since we named the background cards, we could say which one we were pairing with our finished paintings. But honestly, this game is so good that we would’ve done whatever modifications necessary to make it work! It’s not very often I get to feel like an accomplished painter! Although some of us were clearly using discount pigments and lacked an artistic vision!

Kitty: Hey… that had better not be directed at me!

Lizzy: I would never…

Brooks: I’m definitely taking pictures of your next dud, Lizzy! Gotta have proof that not all of your paintings are artistry at its best!

Lizzy: You wouldn’t!

Brooks: I would! Although, what is artistry at its best is Canvas! It’s like Mystic Vale got drunk and had a threesome with Pastiche and Starving Artist, and then one Kickstarter later gave birth to Canvas! It is definitely a new favorite and will stay close to the table at all times! And in all seriousness, this is a game that feels communal and meaningful.

Kitty: So true. I remember standing in front of a Dora Maar and feeling so moved by a simple photograph that I felt changed afterwards. Art is a reflection of our own lives and desires. Art is as individual as those who appreciate it. Art is primal, evocative, seductive, thought provoking, divisive, and of course, subjective. Although there is nothing subjective about this: Canvas is a masterpiece!

Brooks: 9.5/10 ~ Kitty: 9.5/10 ~ Lizzy: 9/10

!!!GAME PLAYLIST!!!
Deep Burn Blue ~ The Paper Kites
Different Colors ~ WALK THE MOON
Blanco ~ J Balvin
Pink ~ Leon
Violet World ~ Sody
Dancing Under Red Skies ~ Dermot Kennedy
Blue Light ~ Emily King
Every Color ~ Louis The Child/Foster the People
Dora Maar ~ Hunter Hunted
Art of Letting You Go ~ Tori Kelly
War Paint ~ Kelly Clarkson
Grey ~ Why Don’t We
Suburbia Blue ~ Future Junior
Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris ~ Hayley Williams
Art Deco ~ Lana Del Rey
Paint It Black ~ The Rolling Stones
Pink Light ~ MUNA
Scarlet Paintings ~ Milky Chance
Art Exhibit ~ Young the Giant
Café Amarillo ~ Local Natives
Harden the Paint ~ Foster the People
Violet ~ Bad Suns
The Painter ~ Future Islands
Pink Lemonade ~ James Bay
Yellow Light ~ Of Monsters and Men