Chrono Gallery Prototype update - Gamesmiths

My Bluff Auction game, Chrono Gallery: Museum of Lost History (I do NOT love the title for that one) is "in the fire" for this month's Gamesmiths meeting, so last night I took some time to (finally) update my prototype a bit. I created tiles for the auctions, and that took some design work as well. Here's what I came up with:

There are 5 colors of artifacts (well, 6 actually - but 1 is different from the rest):

COLOR	CULTURE
Green	Mayan
Red	Roman
Blue	Greek
Yellow	Egyptian
Black	African
Purple	Future

The Purple auction will be for tiles which give you an ability of some kind, not an artifact that you display for points. Also, the purple auction is strictly "how many Purple are there?" while the other auctions are "How many Red (for example) + Purple are there?" (Purple is wild).

For each Culture there will be 3 types of artifact:

• Tools
  
• Weapons
  
• Art

And for each type of artifact there will be 3 Eras:

• Ancient
  
• Medieval
  
• Modern

(Not sure exactly what a "Modern Roman Tool" might look like, but whatever) The artifacts will offer a small bonus as well:

Artifact Type	Game Bonus
Tool	+1 die of that color
Weapon	Re-roll 1 die before bidding
Art	+1 VP

In addition, the Purple tiles give you things like:

• +1 die of a particular color
  
• +2 purple dice (one-use)
  
• Re-roll Any Dice

And each auction stack will have 1 special tile which also gives you no points but a bigger game benefit:

• +1 Bid Marker
  
• Overbid with a tied bid
  
• +2 dice to roll

(Currently there are 2 of each of those tiles) I'm hoping these abilities will be interesting and fun enough. As for scoring, I'm not certain exactly how I'd like to do that. I have always considered that each player should be allowed 3 Exhibits, and that tiles in any given exhibit must share 1 attribute (Culture, Type, or Era). Part of me wants to go one by one and reward Culture sets, Type sets, and then Era sets - meaning if you have tiles that fit into more than one set, they'll score twice). Part of me wants to award 1vp per tile (so it's always worth getting tiles when you can) and rewarding a significant bonus for a set. And part of me likes the idea of some tiles being worthless to you after a point (they don't fit into your exhibits) and so you are encouraged to trade them with opponents.

I am going to stick with the recent structure change wherein upon winning an auction you may either trade your tile to an opponent (for any combination of dice and artifacts), 'sell' the tile to the game for +1 die, or keep the tile to score in your Exhibits. Maybe it would be wise to allow changing in a tile for a die later as well - in case you get a tile hoping to get a matching one later, and if someone takes that matching one, your tile is now useless... not sure about that.

I'm excited to finally playtest this game!