Mischief at the Museum (2021)

In the cooperative setup, you take on the role of museum creators, working together to put together a grid of museum rooms for a museum of whatever theme you decide as a group. Picking a theme has no mechanical purpose, but the game encourages light roleplaying, so knowing whether you’re making a bacon or donut museum helps encourage that. Rooms are things like the gift shop, special exhibit, hands-on exhibit, bathroom, etc…

Then you get dealt one of 6 characters: three museum employees (Docent, Janitor, Volunteer) and 3 family members (Grandparent, Parent, Teen). The mechanic involved is age; players and NPC visitors in the museum are either Youth, Adult, or Senior. Of course there are roleplaying opportunities here too.

Then you get dealt Attribute Cards, basically sets to collect by moving around collecting memory tokens (Education, Bonding, Romance, and Mischief). You’ll get to manage your cards by drawing and discarding as the game goes on. It’s played over 7 turns, or the 7 hours the museum is open.

Each turn you have 5 Actions you can do, kept track of by cards you flip over. One Action, the Hour Action, changes each hour to keep things fresh. There are certain conditions that have to be met, involving the number of people in a room and their ages, to collect the memory tokens. The roleplaying charm comes from describing these actions, including what mischievous things you do, as you do them.

At the end you complete the best sets you can with the tokens you’ve collected and add up the points.

-description from designer