Counterfeit Gallery | Public Alpha

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, slightly criminal gallery sim. You forge famous public-domain masterpieces yourself, stroke by stroke, with a mouse, a finger or a stylus. Then you hang them on your walls and sell them to people who really want to believe.

You are the forger

• 42 real masterpieces to copy, from Malevich's Black Square to The Starry Night, The Great Wave, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and finally the most recognisable smile in the world.
• Real paint. Oil stays wet and blends. Watercolour glazes. Tempera behaves like tempera. Choose your brush heads, and mix your colours from the tubes you own.
• Honest grading. When you finish, the game compares your canvas with the original for composition, colour, shape and detail, and puts a price on it. The better your forgery, the more it's worth.

Your gallery comes alive

• Visitors walk in off the street, look at your work, whisper to each other and leave reviews. Every one has a personality.
• 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 and furniture. 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.

The art world notices

A cast of characters drifts through your door: your sharp-tongued friend Ilona, the collector Márton Halász, who doesn't care what anything is, only what it's worth, and an art expert whose eye you'd rather avoid. The more you sell, the more dangerous the questions get.

"Tell me: is it for sale, or are we both merely admiring the lie?" (Márton Halász)

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Platforms: Windows (64-bit), Linux (64-bit), Android (APK, sideload; arm64, Android 8.0+).
Controls (desktop): mouse to paint. In the gallery, WASD/arrows pan, Q/E or right-drag orbit, scroll to zoom, Home to reset the camera.

This is an in-development build. Expect rough edges and missing features, and please tell me what you find! Saves may be reset between major versions.

Credits

• Every painting in the game is a public-domain work, reproduced from Wikimedia Commons (faithful PD-Art reproductions). Full per-file provenance ships with the game.
• Made in Unity by Code Scrambler Productions.
• AI disclosure: parts of this project (some promotional art and portraits, and drafts of some dialogue and code) were produced with the help of generative AI tools. The gameplay screenshots and video on this page are captured from the game itself.