In the Point Reyes Myriorama, a card game in which players rearrange illustrated fragments of a landscape to form a story, there are more than 620 sextillion possible combinations.
It’s a comically large number, especially given that the miscellany emerges from just 24 slender cards, all accommodated in a small box. The game offers a window into the mind of its creator, Cameo Wood, who, like the deck she dreamed up, has taken on countless forms.
Ms. Wood, a 47-year-old resident of Inverness, is a polymath. Over the years, she’s been a tech founder and hacker, a filmmaker and producer of immersive theater, a beekeeper, and a humanist lay leader and celebrant specializing in end-of-life ceremonies. She completed graduate coursework in fields ranging from witchcraft and magic to medical neuroscience, and she finished a master’s degree at Harvard last year focused on American psychic research. She is currently developing a television pilot about J.B. Rhine, the botanist-turned-parapsychology researcher.
Ms. Wood grew up in Stockbridge, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, before moving to the Bay Area in the mid-1990s to work in tech. She arrived just as the dot-com boom ushered in a period of wild techno-exuberance.
Her latest project, though, is based on a 19th-century parlor novelty; what the Rubik’s Cube craze was to the 1980s, the myriorama was to the 1820s. Each panel, which is narrower than a playing card, shows a slice of scenery that can be placed in any order to form a continuous horizon. Myriorama, meaning “myriad views,” comes from the Greek myrias, meaning “countless,” and orama, meaning “vision” or “scene.” With each rearrangement, the landscape shifts, offering a new route through the same world. “You can keep shuffling and never hit the same order twice,” Ms. Wood said. “It’s the same world, but every time you see a different path through it.”
Ms. Wood first encountered the concept in the pages of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials,” the cult fantasy series in which a deck of cards is used as a tool for divination and storytelling. Ms. Wood, a lifelong science-fiction and fantasy fan drawn to systems, maps and world-building, found the form appealing. “I went looking for a traditional Victorian-style myriorama but I just couldn’t find one,” she said. “There was one website where you could download and print your own set, and a few modern decks—steampunk, aliens, Greek myth—but nothing that felt like my world. At some point, I thought, ‘Well, if I want one this badly, I should probably just make one about the place I love most, which is Point Reyes.’”
To bring the idea into being, she turned to an old collaborator, Carrie Alyson, an illustrator she met in 2008. At the time, Ms. Wood was running Her Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper, an urban beekeeping shop she opened in San Francisco, and she hired Ms. Alyson to paint a mural. For the card deck, Ms. Wood was looking for someone with an “art nouveau, steampunk-meets-nature” aesthetic. Ms. Alyson fit the bill.
She traveled to Point Reyes from her home in Tacoma, Wash., taking reference photographs and sketching on site. The challenge was artistic and mathematical. “The hardest part was trying to capture these landscapes accurately, but also in this very specific technical format,” she said. “It required a lot of geometry. I had to figure out where the horizon lines could go so I could create the greatest range of landscapes.”
How do you create a series of connectable images that accommodate radically different scales and angles—from the steep descent of the 313 steps to the Point Reyes Lighthouse to the flat sweep of Drake’s Estero—without breaking the illusion of a single, continuous world? The resulting deck, available for preorder, is a series of vibrant, textural illustrations that evoke the diurnal rhythms of Point Reyes and teem with nearly fantastical flora and fauna. The cards include iconic vistas and landmarks, but it’s clear that the project was never a quest for perfect similitude.
The cypress tree tunnel, planted in 1930, stretches toward no apparent endpoint as a great horned owl swoops through the foreground. River otters play in the waters of Abbott’s Lagoon and a fox prowls the dunes at Limantour Beach, offering a meditative view of a traveler’s not-so-solitary passage through nature.
Ms. Alyson initially tried working in watercolor and gouache but quickly realized that matching colors across 24 panels would take years. She ultimately shifted to drawing on her iPad. The immediacy of the medium allowed her to draw the landscapes as she experienced and imagined them.
The finished deck invites players to embark on what Ms. Wood describes as a kind of hero’s quest. “I love the idea that someone could toss down a few cards and say, ‘Okay, that’s our day. We’ll go to Marconi, then Sculptured Beach, then out to the lagoon,’” she said. “Or maybe they lay out the day they had and frame it. It’s a way of planning a journey or remembering one.”