Artistes Misérables is a humorous race-to-the-bottom card game where each player is a 19th century artist, trying to create as many masterworks as possible before dying sick, broke and depressed. In other words, a historical simulation.

A player's muses are Poverty, Infirmity and Despair, represented by colored tokens. These are not only part of your score, they are a threshold that must be reached for the quality of certain paintings, e.g. "you must be this miserable to paint this masterpiece".

On their turn, a player can take two different actions from the following list:

1) Draw a token of any color
2) Play an Action on any player
3) Draw a card
4) Paint a painting

All of these are done in the form of dark humor, from glorying in the despair of being dumped to reveling in the poverty of gambling debts that you will take to your grave unpaid.

The game ends when a player succumbs to the weight of their combined poverty, infirmity and despair (a literal 'sudden death' ending), or when the deck runs out, in which case all the players are drafted into World War 1 and die a horrible death in the trenches of France.

Scoring is based on accumulated misery, and the quality and quantity of paintings you produced before your predictable and unlamented end.

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