Your job as Curator is to expand the museum and its collection. With help from your employees you will build new wings and collect objects to put on display in the museum.

Your team is represented by five tokens that are used to determine actions you may take. Once you select your action, flip the token to reveal a different action which you can use at a later time.

Contracts can be won to obtain priceless artifacts such ‘the skull of the neanderthal man’. To fulfill these contracts involves completing Tetris like puzzles of color and space matching.

Curators is a game that caught our eye some time ago with its striking visuals and having finally played the game we’re eager to tell you our thoughts on what is starting to become a highly favoured game in the community and chalking up a lot of positivity amongst reviewers.

Designed by Jacob Westerlund and published by Worldshapers, Curators is a 1-4 euro tile-placement game where players take on the role of managing a growing museum and filling it with exotic exhibits as they compete against other curators in a bid to become ‘Museum of the Year’ by claiming the most visitors.

From the off there’s great table presence with Curators due to the large spiral of polyomino tiles that centers the table and represents additional wings to expand your museum and house your growing collection.

Nearby the Auction House board holds a colourful array of items that can be bought during play and both elements represent the main player interaction of the game.

Other than a budget allocation and a skeleton staff of employee tokens, your museum begins with only the entrance and warehouse tile in front of you along with two secret contracts for your objectives – so setup is clean, simple and we’re straight into the game…

Across several rounds you’ll be assigning your employees to expand your museums capabilities, to gather and display artifacts and hopefully achieve your contracts which take the form of tile/colour combinations to unlock additional VP to take you closer to your goal.

Employees each come with a skillset, so for example the Carpenter will build new wings by taking tiles from the Spiral, while the Collection Manager/Archaeologist will go out to locate artifacts to bring to the warehouse. So per turn you are choosing which skill you want to call upon for that moment and that’s important to remember, that we’re assigning a skill and not an employee by name, in fact this is the smartest element of Curators…

Why? Because your staff all come with a secondary trait and as you assign an employee you’ll flip their token to reveal an additional skill (which matches from the original skillsets) and then suddenly you have 2 carpenters to play in your next move and this results in action multipliers allowing you to really gain some ground.

Basically if you can learn the patterns then you can chain employee actions into some very powerful combo moves which adds great strategy to a game that on its surface appears so straight forward.

The economics center around the cash generated in relation to your visitor numbers and will be spent investing in either new artifacts at the Auction House or potentially in new wings for the building at the Spiral.

To create the best experience for your visitors, it will involve a symbiotic relationship between collecting items and then housing them in your wings. So you’ll need to choose wisely where you invest, because you need both resources to control the chances of fulfilling your contracts. But even though polyomino tiles may vary in size and colour for your objectives, it’s only their position in the spiral that determines the cost.

It’s a really neat mechanic that offers you a route in expanding your building with tiles starting at $0, $1000, $2000 and increasing as you move along the track. This means that you can hold your own and select the available free tiles in order to simply expand your building or instead “Pay-to-Play” and access tiles that will help fulfill your contracts.

That variety means that even when cash is at an all time low, or you have your eyes on other essential purchases you’ll still have capacity to expand and play through the game.

Player Interaction in some ways exists at the Spiral and the Auction House as you’ll be taking items from a central store; that said the fact that you aren’t aware of peoples contractual agendas means that any “Take That” aspects are more happenstance and fluke if you take an item or tile that you need and this impacts another players objectives…

I can see opportunities of introducing a secondary public set of contracts which would add some of that competitive spice and give more player interaction; that said Curators is a solid and fun game as it stands and has seen a lot of play through at our table.

With that in mind… Replayability – like most games of this nature you’ll lean toward the same actions in the first few rounds until you gain the resources that allow you to focus on your objectives and it’s certainly the objectives that bring variety to the game. Luckily there’s plenty of them to keep this game fresh, along side a more advanced rule set which introduces additional play styles and drafting mechanics.

Overall Curators is a solid production with fantastic component artwork and story; available on Kickstarter from April it’s certainly a title to get behind.