Cue Up a Little Night Music and Play the Board Game Nocturne

Nocturne is a new set collection game that incorporates a mostly new bidding mechanic for players to acquire tiles to spice up the usual point-salady aspect to games of this ilk. It’s the latest title from Flatout Games, the boutique publisher behind the board games Cascadia, Calico, and Point Salad/City, and also this year’s Cascadia Rolling Rivers/Hills games.
In Nocturne, players will bid to claim tiles from a common tableau, collecting them but not placing or building anything else with the tiles they get. The tableau size varies by player count, but the method of obtaining them is always the same. The start player on each turn, who will usually just be the winner of the last tile, places their lowest bidding token (2-7 to start, plus a star token that is automatically the winner), after which the next player may place a higher token on any orthogonally adjacent tile without a token on it already or pass. The bidding continues to snake around the tableau until all players pass or someone has placed a bid that can’t be topped. The highest bidder gets that tile and leaves their bidding token in the vacated space. All players may then take one losing token and place it on the sprite board to claim tiles at the end of the phase, or may just take them all back.
Tiles score in all kinds of ways—sea tiles are just worth a fixed number of points each, feather tiles are worth more the more you have, egg tiles are worth more if you have the most of any player, herb and mushroom tiles score in sets, and so on. There are mirror tiles that you can use as an exact copy of another tile you have, treasure chests that are worth -1 point but that let you draw three tiles from the stack and keep one, and concoction tiles that let you draw three concoction cards (private objectives) to keep one.