Share the Holiday Fun with Unique Games from Oakland’s Museum Shop

Share the holiday fun with unique games and pastimes that bring the past back with a twist. The Hollow Woods, The Mystery Mansion, and the Shadow World all revive the Victorian craze for ‘myrioramas’, a game in which a series of illustrated cards can be laid out in seemingly endless combinations to create new and unique stories or panoramic scenes. The 20 picture cards in each of these sets can be placed in any order to create seamless scenes. Almost infinite combinations of cards provide endless storyscaping possibilities. Each game includes an instructional booklet and comes housed in a sturdy clamshell box.

The Hollow Woods, $19.99. Traverse an enchanted landscape as you build a perpetual panorama inhabited by fire-breathing dragons, magical unicorns, and sinister shadow figures. With many games to play and millions of stories to tell, each turn of the card is a new adventure. Where will the story take you?

The Mystery Mansion, $19.99. Follow the corridor through a mysterious country house and build a perpetual panorama with its inhabitants and their secrets. Find sinister suits of armor and the aftermaths of strange accidents, butlers with a grudge and glamorous couples where revenge is never far from the surface.

The Shadow World, $19.99. London, 1900. A brilliant scientist leaves the world above to create his own world below, determined to prove his radical theory – That gravity is a geometric property of spacetime. What happens when time is bent, space is collapsed, and dimensions overlap? Descend into the shadow world to find out.

The Fantod Pack, $10.95. Edward Gorey’s trademark sense of impending doom is nowhere more darkly humorous than in this, his version of a tarot card deck. Each of the 20 cards forecasts a list of outcomes for the user ranging from the merely unpleasant (loss of hair, breakage, thwarted ambitions) to the downright horrible (catarrh, spasms, shriveling). The 32-page booklet provides interpretation of the cards.

Located at Oakland’s historic Bell Tower Building, the Visitors Center and Museum Shop is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Weekend hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the winter. The Shop will be closed on Christmas Day.