Wondrous Museum
- Board's Eye View
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
Wondrous Museum, from Broadway Toys, is a tableau and engine-building card game where the 2-5 players (plus there's a solitaire mode) are curators adding exhibits to their museums and putting on exhibition shows. The game is designed by Zong-Ger.
Players have a starting hand of five cards and, on your turn, an option is to draw three cards from the deck into your hand and discard one card. You can't repeatedly take this action because your hand-size limit is eight cards. In addition to the draw deck there are two market displays of cards, and you will probably be particularly attracted to the 'special exhibit' cards in the 'black market' display as, tho' expensive, these can have high scoring values and powerful in-game effects; to the extent that players are allowed no more than one black market card in their museum tableau.
To place an item into your museum from your hand or from the market display you must pay the cost on the card, plus an extra cost for market cards, depending on their position in the market. You do this by discarding cards from your hand and by discarding admiration tokens in your museum. The tokens you start with have a value of 2 but that value will vary depending on which cards your admiration tokens are on. Finally, you have the option of running a show. This lets you trigger all cards in your museum that have the rune symbol/colour that you choose. Typically, this will net you more admiration tokens and/or cards and ways to score end-game points.
Wondrous Museum is a hand management puzzle optimisation card game where there are critical decisions to be taken over where and when to place exhibits in your museum and where and when you trigger particular runes for activation, because once you trigger a rune you won't be able to trigger it again until the rune tokens are refreshed (after you've activated four of them).
Tho' players are each creating their own combo and engine-building tableau, it's a very finite one: the game ends when a player has added just nine exhibit cards to their museum. Tho' that makes for a quick (20-30 minute) game, it has left some of our team at Board's Eye View frustrated that they hadn't had enough opportunity to develop their museum and make full use of their carefully constructed card combos. Of course, there's nothing to stop you house ruling a higher end-game trigger for a longer game.
Wondrous Museum is attractively presented in a reasonably compact box. The artwork from Daniel Cunha is good and the iconography for the card effects is mostly clear. Our main gripe is that the admiration tokens have different values on their flip side so are prone to accidental confusion. That's always a cause for complaint in games. On the plus side, Broadway Toys have added to the game's replayability by incorporating six sets of themed exhibits, from which you choose two at the start to shuffle into the routine exhibits deck. The themed card effects are different enough to alter players' experience of the game; for example, if you add in the Ancient Weapons cards you will generate more player interaction...
