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The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber is a Game Of Induction about selling and buying fake art and it involves logic, pattern recognition and inductive reasoning: one player will impersonate the Game Master (known as "Gallerist") and 2-6 other players will be "Collectors", wherein the player with the most Millions wins the game.



Official Rules: .PDF



Rules Overview

The Gallerist invents a Secret Rule at the beginning of the game which describes a set of criteria that determines whether a drawing is fake or original. The Secret Rule is the Artistic Manifesto (an example: here): "the soul of an artist, stolen by the serial killer Simon Charles Rheber to create its perfect forgeries". However in gameplay the Secret Rule is something simple like "the drawing must contain a triangle" or "the drawing must only contain zig-zag lines".



Collectors\' Objective

The Collectors’ objective is to avoid Mistakes while attempting to Guess whether other players’ Drawings are Fake or Original: the least Mistakes the more Millions they will earn. To do so they will try to learn the Artistic Manifesto by keeping a critical mindset and making opportune experiments with their drawings, testing their theories against the Gallerist feedbacks: was the drawing Fake or Original?



Gallerist\' Objective

The Gallerist’s objective is to invent an Artistic Manifesto that is at the same time obscure and self-evident for the Collectors to find out. In fact, Collectors will Guess each experiment (=drawing) 2 times: the First Guess before peeking at the Artistic Manifesto, the Second Guess after peeking at the Artistic Manifesto. The Gallerist scores completely different from Collectors: during the course of the game the Gallerist needs to plan in advance their Targeted Clues to minimize the Collector’s Mistakes of the Second Guesses, while maximizing the Collectors’ Mistakes of the First Guesses:


if too many Collectors made Mistakes during their Second Guesses, the more Millions the Gallerist will lose, because the game will end in a SCAM;
otherwise the more Collectors made Mistakes during their First Guesses, the more Millions the Gallerist will earn because the game ends in an AUCTION.


Collectors do not lose Millions for Mistakes made the Second (First) time if the game ends in an AUCTION (SCAM), but they can choose what/how to Guess and they have Communication Limits, making the guessing game a challenging Prisoner Dilemma.
Whichever player has the most Millions after Collectors had guessed two times is the winner.


About Drawing

Being good in drawing is at least irrelevant and, at most, counter-productive in The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber: in fact players can use other means of representations to make their drawings if they prefer (like stamps + ink pads or a camera + some Jenga blocks + a printer), because only their ability in pattern recognition is tested. However, the classification of free-hand drawings (especially the ones done badly or quickly, which the game rules are optimized for) is one of the most challenging and rewarding task in pattern recognition: in this sense, being good in drawing, could even reduce this challenge to other opponents (especially the Gallerist) and, therefore, being counter-productive.



About Game Design



Differences from other Game Of Induction

The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber differs from other Games Of Induction in two features:

The Game Master (known as the Gallerist) play by themselves as the other players and, therefore, can win or loose;
The Secret Rule (known as Artistic Manifesto) of the Game Master can be any rule what-so-ever, because the quality of the rule is enforced by the scoring system, making complex and/or ambiguous rules sub-optimal strategies to choose for the Game Master.




Similarities with other Game Of Induction

The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber like many other Games Of Induction (Eleusis, Penultima, Zendo) is also a great tool for teaching scientific heuristic to the youngest players: the game comprises a variant called Panama Papers which is a gateway variant to introduce the youngest into the most complex aspect of the core game. For more information on the educational value of Induction games, the reader can refer to one of the earliest articles: H. Charles Romesburg, 1967, Simulating scientific inquiry with the card game Eleusis.



Further Reading

Gerardo Priore, Design Considerations Over “The Strange Forgeries Of Mr. S.C.Rheber”

-description from designer