Collecting occult trinkets and curios

Let’s talk about a game I wanted to try for a while now: 🔮 Chamber of Wonders from Ludus Magnus Studio . What drew me towards this game is most of all the theme and art style, which reminds me of the video game Darkest Dungeon 🤩 - thick black contours and a generally gloomy atmosphere. In Chamber of Wonders you are aristocrats in Victorian London, curating bizarre and occult collections of trinkets and baubles.

Even though the game comes in a big box with a heap of cardboard components, the complexity is surprisingly low. The 20-30 minutes playtime listed on the box kind of hints at this. In spite of this, Chamber of Wonder goes all in on the table presence and tactility with really cool looking stuff. 😁

For every game you randomly choose 4 locations out of 5 (which are all double sided), plus 4 contact cards out of 6 to set up the play area.
Each turn you send a worker to one of the locations and activate an adjacent contact. All the actions revolve around either earning money 💰 or drawing new cards 🀄 - but there are lots of different effects! You could have bidding, auction, closed drafting, etc., depending on what locations you have set up. 😉

Then at the end of each player turn, everyone gets to play a card into their collection. So even though you only act every now and then, you always get to play a card, even if it is not your turn. There are 6 main types of cards with their little nuances: e.g. to play a Monster 👹 you need a head, a torso and a leg card and play them as a set; or Grotesque 💀 cards earn you skull tokens for added end game majority. 

A game ends after just a few worker placements, so you can exhibit up to 8-9 cards. Then after a quick scoring phase you can find out who has the most spectacular collection. 🏆

💬The game is indeed lightning fast and simple. Our biggest gripe is how set up and teardown in comparison is a bit unwieldy - though on the flipside you get the cool billboard style locations and elevated card holders. We do really like the variety you get from the randomized setup, bringing a bit of variation to the mechanics in use. And the art is just lovely! 😊