The Great Art Race

I have a colour-coded spreadsheet for Patrician III's trade routes, so when I sat down with The Great Art Race I expected either a hidden gem or a polite waste of time. It is, honestly, a little of both, and understanding which camp you fall into is the whole game. The setup is tight and clever: it is the interwar period, your family's art collection has been stolen, and up to five relatives - AI or hotseat human - are racing to reassemble it by winning auction bids across Europe and America. Money comes from building and running colonial plantations that produce goods like coffee, tobacco, or tea, then selling that output at emporiums for profit. On top of that, you can play the stock market, bet on horse races, or even take time-consuming expeditions into the unknown for bonus cash. The result is a light web of income streams that feeds directly into one objective: outbid everyone at the next auction. Time management is the real skill - you are physically moving your character on an isometric world map, and arriving late to an auction or failing to pay your plantation workers on time are genuine punishments. For newcomers to the management-sim genre, this is actually a reasonable entry point, and I want to be upfront about that. The decision space is narrow enough that you will not be paralysed by options. Pick two or three plantation locations, establish a reliable harvest route, keep an eye on auction calendars, and reinvest early profits into the stock ticker when commodity prices dip. There is even a fake-painting problem at auctions - art classes you can attend let you spot forgeries, which is a small but satisfying meta-layer on top of the bidding. None of this is intimidating, and there is a clear feedback loop between every decision and your wallet. The problems arrive quickly and do not go away. There is no real tutorial, and the game offers minimal tooltips - you will need to hunt down the PDF manual to understand some mechanics. Once you establish a working income engine, the difficulty curve flattens almost completely. Opponents are passive; the AI rarely sabotages your plantations aggressively enough to matter. The randomised historical events add flavour but almost no mechanical weight. Replay value is thin: the same optimal route through the plantation cities will work every run, and the hotseat multiplayer - which supports up to five players at one PC - is the only thing that meaningfully extends the life of the game. There is no online mode, no mod ecosystem worth mentioning, and the graphics and audio were already dated on release in 2004. The honest summary is this: The Great Art Race is a 2-to-4 hour experience with a ceiling that dedicated players will hit before dinner. Its DNA traces back to the Commodore 64 original Vermeer from 1987, and the bones show. If you want something in this neighbourhood with real depth, Patrician III runs on the same era of hardware and offers ten times the decision-making. But if you want a low-friction, genuinely pleasant way to kill an afternoon - one where the economy loop feels rewarding even if it never gets complicated - this delivers that in a neat, unpretentious package.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on The Great Art Race.