New Game Round-up: A Museum for Gen Con, An Expansion for Viticulture, and Three Monkeys for Your Table

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, 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!

Three monkeys have started a construction company, and the building contracts are coming in quick! Now the monkeys have to work together to complete their contracts before time runs out.

The game of 3 Monkeys is played in teams of three players, with each player taking on the role of one of the three monkeys: the monkey who can't speak, the monkey who can't see, or the monkey in the middle.

• The monkey who can't speak is the only one who can see the the contract card with the outline of the structure that their team must build, but they are not allowed to talk. They can communicate only in gestures.

• The monkey in the middle must interpret the gestures of the monkey who can't speak and relay them to the monkey who can't see so that they can build the structure.

• The monkey who can't see is the only one who can touch the pieces, but they must play the game with their eyes closed. They are responsible for building the structure, based on the directions given to them by the monkey in the middle.