Museum: Kickstarter Edition (2019)

This entry is for the Kickstarter edition of Museum. Packaged inside are several expansions that are not contained in the retail release:

• The Crystal Skulls expansion, which adds 12 Crystal Skull cards which can be shuffled into the artifacts and when collected can either be played as a regular artifact or can be sold to a special 'Crystal Skull Collector' for many points.
• The Assistants, each giving a different set-up and a unique ability.
• The League of Extraordinary Explorers, double sized cards that can be purchased for 8 prestige points and exposed in the Main Gallery, these cards also have a unique ability.
• The Solo mode.
• Discard Tiles, for placing cards in a player's storage.
• Extra Cards: 5 Expert cards, 3 Favour cards, 4 Headline cards, 12 Patron cards

About the game:
It’s the turn of the 20th century, the golden age of museums. As interest in and accessibility of museums grew exponentially, many institutions underwent an intense period of expansion on both an intellectual and physical level, searching to grow their collections for profit and science.

You play as a curator of one such museum and it’s your job to build the biggest, most coherent collection that you can in this game of collection and bartering featuring over 300 individual illustrations by Vincent Dutrait and authentic architectural facts. But it’s no simple task!

Each player in Museum has a small collection of relics to get them started, after which, they will have to send explorers around the world to uncover others. These relics each have a value which is either the cost to add them to your museum, or how much they contribute towards adding other relics to your museum. “Spent” Relics are added to your reserve. You can withdraw them from it by exchanging them for an equal amount of items however your opponents also has access to your reserve!

During the game you will be required to assemble different collections. These can be from different categories (war, agriculture, architecture, etc) or periods (Ancient Egypt, Rome, Aztec, etc). Patron cards will give you bonus cards for amassing certain collections. Explorer cards will allow you to hire famous archeologists to confer bonuses to your museum and event cards will provide you with some game changing circumstances that you’ll have to work around, based on historical events!

All these different elements make compiling your collection an interesting and sometimes tricky experience! At the end of the game points are scored based on collections and their value and the player with the most points wins!