Promenade: Deck building with an artful twist
I recently made a jump back into deck-building games, rediscovering old classics like Dominion and playing new favorites like Paperback. It’s not that I disliked deck builders, but rather games with other mechanisms would often hit the table first. For those unfamiliar, a deck-building game is a card game where construction of a deck is the main focus of gameplay.
Another deck builder I recently checked out was Promenade from game designer and artist Ta-Te Wu, who also designed Cat Rescue. Promenade, which is coming to Kickstarter on April 9 from Sunrise Tornado Game Studio, is a fun and interesting twist on deck builders.
Promenade is a deck-building game about the Impressionist art market. Players are purchasing and exhibiting artwork, while working to increase the market rating of various types of paintings. As players acquire cards for their deck, the rating increases for that painting genre that was just purchased. There are five genres, represented by five different colors: portraits, landscapes, animals, seascapes and abstracts. The Impressionist style artwork is colorful and elegant. My personal favorite is this kitty cat.
Each player gets a player board with marked locations for a draw pile, two spots for their actions, and a discard pile. There is also a track on the player board so that players can easily see the market rating of the genres.
On a player’s turn, they can do two actions: haggle, acquire or show. Players may do the same action twice and in any order. When you haggle, spend a card to draw two more cards from your deck.
When you acquire, players spend cards to purchase a card from the Promenade area, which is filled paintings or gold cards. Each card costs a different amount depending on where it’s sitting.
And this is where it gets economically interesting — gold cards in your hand are worth their printed value, but the value of the paintings in your hand is worth their current market rating, which is represented on a separate board that sits next to the main board.
As you spend cards from your hand to acquire a new painting, that painting genre goes up in its market rating. The gold value doesn’t increase but purchasing gold cards moves the gold marker up the board as well, but this marker only matters at the end when you calculate the end-game value of the gold cards in your deck. Players can also spend their gold card’s one-time special ability and remove the card from their deck.
So if players are just buying just the abstracts, the value of abstract cards in everyone’s deck will skyrocket.
Lastly, you can show. To show a painting in an exhibition in the museum, you must spend the cards in your hand to display it, and the cost of displaying your painting depends on which exhibition you want to place it in. Furthermore, the exhibition must be seeking that specific genre of painting, as depicted by the randomly placed invitation cubes at the start of the game in the exhibition space. Some invitation cubes are black, which means any genre can be shown there.
When you decide to show your painting, spend your cards to place your painting there and you immediately receive victory points. Naturally, you get more VPs if you show a painting at the exhibit first, and you place your meeple on the card so people know whose painting was shown where. And of course, the market rating of that genre increases as well.
After your two actions, place the two piles from your action spaces into your discard pile and draw more cards from your draw pile. If there aren’t any cards in your draw pile, shuffle the discard pile and place it into your draw pile area and draw your cards. This is the fundamental mechanism for deck builders.
As painting cards empty from the Promenade, the cost of each location increases with each refill of cards. The game ends when one or more of these conditions are met: 12 or more paintings are shown in the museum, the painting deck is empty, or any marker on the market rating board is at 70 or higher.
Players then calculate the value of their decks based on the paintings’ market values and gold ratio value. There are also end-game bonuses based on the cards in play, which five are randomly displayed out at the start of the game. The player with the most VPs wins the game!
What’s unique for me about this deck builder is the manipulation of the market. I also like the variety of having different end-game bonuses with each game, and how the exhibition invitations — what genre each exhibition is looking for — are also variable for each game.
If you’re a fan of economic games and deck builders, or just love games about paintings, check out Promenade. The game plays in about an hour and adds an artful twist to your standard deck builder.
3 Replies to “Promenade: Deck building with an artful twist”
Sounds like an interesting game! I played so many other deck building games before I played dominion and people would always start off the rules saying, so if you’ve played dominion… 😂
Thanks for reading! And indeed! Know one deck builder, and you’re pretty much set for life. 😁
Thank you for your awesome tips. I am new to the deck building industry and I need all the help that I can get. You have taught me a lot with this post. I appreciate your knowledge and expertise. I hope that someday, I will be as skillful as you and your company. Cheers to a more successful year of 2021! Best regards from our deck builders in Ashburn, Virginia.