At the beginning of each round of Museum, players are able to inspect the latest haul of archaic goodies unearthed from each of the four continents. There’s usually two on offer per region and you’re free to take any one of those into your hand. Once you’ve gotten hold of the artefacts you want, it’s tough decision time. Every Object card has a printed value, ranging from one to five, that represents both what it will cost to exhibit the piece and how many victory points it will net you. MYSTERY GAMES MAKE GREAT FAMILY GIFTS: strategy board games are excellent presents for families that love playing indoor games together. 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! Any game that makes you feel clever is always a winner, and Exit does just this. But don’t be thinking it’s an easy feeling. The puzzles, while logical, do take some thinking about and there are some absolute stand out moments in a number of the boxes. Find the thief or thieves from the 16 suspects by looking at clues in the museum. Note this down in your notebook during your six turns to help you with your investigation.

Have you ever stood inside the cavernous halls of a great Museum - perhaps the grandiose prehistoric galleries of Natural History in London or the vast art collections of the New York Metropolitan- and there, amongst all the ancient treasures of civilizations swallowed by time, thought to yourself “How much have I paid to get in here and stare at pots? Pots, for god’s sake. I’ve got pots at home. If I ran a museum, let me tell you, things would be a damn sight better than this sorry debacle. Why, there’d be warships and chariots! There’d be an entire wall of katanas! Nobody would yell at you for riding the mammoth skeleton! By god, it would be the greatest assemblage of wonders that this world has ever seen!”? We hope you enjoyed our rundown of some historic board games – let us know if they've cured your boredom and if you're enjoying playing any by tweeting us @britishmuseum.

Want to exclusively collect Egyptian curios for an exhibit? Go right ahead. But if you’re specifically after relics of Egyptian agriculture or maybe Japanese warfare? That’s where the Domains come in handy. Come the end of the game, you’ll score enormous amounts of bonus points for both the size and variety of your carefully curated showcases- even more if you manage to fulfil the requests of your wealthy museum patrons- but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. First, we’ve got some tomb-robbing to do! Travel the World! Steal Its Stuff This particular board, held in the Fitzwilliam Museum's collection, is the largest of only eight boards currently known from international collections. Measuring 44cm in diameter, it is made from limestone and was gifted to the Museum in 1943 by Major Robert (John) Gayer-Anderson. The board appears to have been broken into two parts, which have been glued together at an unknown point in the past, and comes with a stand. Detailed examination of the board confirms that the two parts were made independently, as observed by the discrepancies in surface colouration, the banding in the stone and a mismatching join, which is especially visible on the underside. The hatching and size of one portion of the board has clearly been crafted in a poor attempt to correspond with the other, perhaps by Gayer-Anderson for display purposes, although without further technical analyses it is difficult to determine which was the original piece, or when this occurred. The accompanying stand, or single foot, is most likely modern as it appears to have been turned on a lathe. Nigel, C.: Design Thinking - Understanding How Designers Think and Work. Berg Publishers, Oxford (2011)

A pale-yellow limestone circular game for mehen. Egypt, Early Dynastic period (around 2925–2575 BC).FOR FRIENDS AND FAMILY GAME NIGHTS: players aged 10+ can immerse themselves in this cinematic, single-play experience. It's a mystery board game that'll draw everyone into a story they won't forget. With that said, it’s a real shame that such a natural and enjoyable theming fit for a mechanic is nearly crushed to death under a landslide of a half-dozen others. Museum is red-handedly guilty of aspiring to be a far heavier game than it needs to be. Look how long this blog has gone on for already. There’s still at least three different major parts of the game I haven’t explained to you yet. Three! And the bad news is that two of them are designed to slow an already leisurely-paced experience down to a treacle-footed crawl. In this expansion, you and your friends can battle it out for public acclaim as well adding a 5th player to your games of Museum! 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! Suggest a suspect: the active player must place one of their investigation tokens face down either on: one of the 16 suspect tiles, or on the emergency exit tile.