Counterfeit Gallery

Code Scrambler Productions

About this game

You inherit an empty little gallery on a quiet city street. The rent is due. The walls are bare. You can paint.

Counterfeit Gallery is a cosy, hand-painted gallery sim. Copy famous public-domain masterpieces yourself, stroke by stroke, with a finger or a stylus. Hang them on your walls and win over the people who wander in to look. It is not a race and nobody is out to catch you: a rough copy still brightens a wall, and a better one draws a bigger crowd.

YOU ARE THE PAINTER

• No drawing skill needed. You start with Malevich's Black Square. The first paintings are big simple shapes, and transfer paper, a proportional grid and more aids arrive early.
• 57 real masterpieces to copy, from Malevich and Mondrian to The Starry Night, The Great Wave, Girl with a Pearl Earring and, eventually, the most recognisable smile in the world.
• Real paint. Oil stays wet and blends. Watercolour glazes. Tempera behaves like tempera. Choose your brushes and mix every colour yourself from the pigment tubes you own.
• Made for touch. Paint with a finger or a stylus, and use the eyedropper, undo, fill and shape tools.
• Honest, detailed feedback. When you finish, an appraiser's report compares your canvas with the original for composition, colour, shape and detail.
• A free sketchbook. Practise any masterpiece without pressure, or import your own reference photos for figure and master studies. Your pictures stay on your device.

YOUR GALLERY COMES ALIVE

• Visitors walk in off the street, look at your work, chat and leave reviews. Everyone has their own taste: the art student loves Kandinsky, the collector wants a Vermeer.
• Some of them want to buy. Haggle: ask for more, pitch the painting, or bluff that you have another buyer. Push too hard and they walk.
• Build it bigger in blueprint mode: rooms, walls, doors, windows, frames, easels, plinths, furniture and desks for your staff. Everything is charged the moment you place it, and you can undo.
• A living neighbourhood: the Route 24 bus runs on a timetable, cars wait at the zebra crossing and the street lamps come on at dusk. A calm, generative soundtrack plays along.

THE ART WORLD NOTICES

A cast of characters drifts through your door: your sharp-tongued friend Ilona, the collector Márton Halász, who cares less about what a painting is than what it is worth, and a critic whose praise opens doors. Hang three works by one artist and you have an exhibition.

GOOD TO KNOW

• Play offline. No ads.
• Landscape only, made for phones and tablets.
• Moving from the itch.io version? Use Options > Saves > Export on the old version and Import here to bring your galleries over.
• The paintings you copy are public-domain works, reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.
• Design, painting simulation, scoring, 3D models and music are made by Code Scrambler Productions.

Made by Code Scrambler Productions. Tell us what you think through Feedback in the pause menu.

What’s new

Counterfeit Gallery comes to Google Play.
• A new look: every screen redrawn as layered cut paper
• 15 new masterpieces to copy, 57 in all
• Artist exhibitions, real paint mixing, simpler staff
• Export and import your galleries (Options > Saves) to move from the itch.io version