Inventions Through Time
Build inventions, run your workshop, travel historical trade routes, and discover how technology changed the world.
You are not just reading about history. You will investigate technology, buy and trade materials, build inventions, manufacture products, complete contracts, and grow your museum as you travel through time.
Your goal: become a successful historical inventor, craftsperson, trader, and museum builder. Understanding how inventions work will help you decide what to make, which materials to buy, where to travel, and which products are worth producing.
How to Play
Each historical chapter introduces new problems, technologies, materials, markets, and opportunities for your growing workshop.
Explore the Chapter
Follow the story, investigate historical evidence, and discover the problem your workshop needs to solve.
Learn the Invention
Learn how the technology worked, why it mattered, what materials it used, and what historians know about its origins.
Complete the Hands-On Lab
Predict, build, test, adjust, and explain the invention through an interactive activity.
Get Your Materials
Purchase materials from regional markets or earn some through Resource Trail activities. Prices vary from place to place.
Produce Goods
Use your workshop to manufacture products. Upgrade your workshop to improve production, efficiency, and quality.
Travel and Trade
Compare prices between locations. Buy materials where they are inexpensive and sell products where demand is stronger.
Complete Contracts
Fill customer and settlement orders to earn coins, knowledge, reputation, and chapter progress.
Grow Your Museum
Add discoveries to your museum, study technology connections, and complete each chapter to continue your journey through history.
What Is Included
Workshop of Wonders combines history, invention, production, trading, hands-on experiments, strategy, and collection.
12 Historical Chapters
Travel from early human technology through ancient civilizations, medieval engineering, printing, navigation, and Renaissance ideas.
74 Inventions
Discover tools, farming technology, writing systems, transportation, mechanical devices, water engineering, printing, navigation, and more.
Hands-On Labs
Predict what will happen, build or test a model, apply what you learned, and explain why the invention works.
Workshop Production
Unlock recipes, purchase supplies, manufacture products, improve quality, and upgrade production.
Regional Markets
Material prices and demand change between locations. Find good buying opportunities and profitable trade routes.
Resource Trail Games
Practice stone selection, fiber twisting, clay preparation, harvesting, metalworking, papermaking, glassmaking, and more.
Contracts and Customers
Produce specific inventions for customers, fill settlement orders, and earn coins and reputation.
Museum Collection
Turn discoveries into exhibits and build a collection showing how technologies developed and connected.
The Great Book
Review inventions, historical information, important people, materials, and technology connections.
History Detective
Study artifacts and evidence, make observations, and think about what historians can and cannot know.
Inventors and Craftspeople
Meet famous historical figures while also learning how communities and ordinary craftspeople developed technology over generations.
Family Learning Records
Review chapter completion, discoveries, learning progress, and useful homeschool records.
Tips for Success
A successful workshop needs more than good inventions. Pay attention to materials, markets, travel, quality, and customer demand.
Do not buy every material in the first market.
Compare prices between locations. A material that is expensive in one region may be much cheaper somewhere else.
Learn before you manufacture.
Complete the lesson and hands-on lab so you understand the invention before investing materials in production.
Watch what each town needs.
Farming settlements, cities, ports, workshops, and trade centers may value very different products.
Keep some coins available.
Travel and materials cost money. Spending every coin on one production run can leave your workshop unable to move.
Quality matters.
Functional goods work, but Well Made and Masterwork goods can be more valuable for customers and contracts.
Use the Resource Trail when you need supplies.
Resource games can help you earn materials, but smart buying, trading, and workshop production are the heart of your business.
Check the Great Book when you need help.
Use it to review inventions, historical people, discoveries, materials, and technology connections.
History does not happen in a straight line.
Civilizations overlap. Ideas can develop independently, travel between regions, and change as communities adapt them.
Your Workshop Is Ready
Begin with the First Makers, investigate your first technologies, build your workshop, trade between historical communities, and grow your museum of inventions.
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