Day 3 - Canvas

We have come a long way in the board game world from cardboard chits and wooden cubes. In Canvas players collect and layer clear cards on top of one another in order to create new works of art, while attempting to meet scoring conditions for points.

The aesthetics of Canvas do much of the heavy lifting here. The game itself is a mash up of game mechanics we've seen before. For example the card selection method can be found in Century Spice Road, where players must pay to pass over cards in the row in order to take a card further in. While the scoring in the game is simple pattern matching and fulfilment.

So the joy of Canvas then is the simplicity of the gameplay, that gets out of the way and allows you to concentrate on the thing that makes it unique, the Art. To score points in Canvas players combine 3 of the transparent art cards they are collecting, with a background image, to create a piece of art, which then scores according to the goals selected during set up.

The "best" painting of course, isn't determined by the players, it is determined by the symbols and how they align with the scoring criteria, but that is not what players will talk about at the end of the game, no, they'll study each player's created paintings and discuss which one they like the best. Does that make Canvas a good game? Not necessarily, but it does make it an enjoyable activity.

For me, as a game, I find it too simple. Your choices are limited, by both your hand size and the inspiration tokens you have that allow you to pay for cards. You are also limited by the cards that come out in the river. The max hand size of 5 means you might be forced to play when you don't want to. And you might not be able to meet scoring goals, not through bad play, but purely through certain icons and colours not being available to you when it was your turn.

That said, I enjoyed my plays enough that I want to come back to Canvas, perhaps try some of the more complex scoring goals or playing with more players, but right now I enjoy it more for the aesthetics and the activity than I do for the game.