ChongYa Lab writes, illustrates and produces its own mystery board games — story-driven cases for 1–4 players, played in half an hour to an hour, where every character is a different mind looking at the same night.
Each volume is a self-contained mystery. Every player gets a character booklet — their own history, their own blind spots, their own reason to hold something back. Clues come out act by act, and the second act makes you re-read the first.
There is no game master and no app. Open the box, read your booklet, start talking. When the group commits to an answer, the truth booklet tells you how close you came.
Written, illustrated, playtested, localised and manufactured by us. This is our own intellectual property — you will not find it in another supplier's catalogue.
Original cases built from our own trick library — not licensed, not reskinned.
Every cover, character and clue card drawn for this specific story.
Romanian written and proofread by native speakers, not machine-dumped.
We are the manufacturer of record — pricing, stock and revisions run through one desk.
Both volumes are published in Romanian today, and further language editions are already on our plan. We would rather decide the order together with the shops that actually want them — so if your market is missing, tell us and we will build an edition for it.
Tell us which language your shelf needs, and roughly how many copies.
Request a Language EditionEvery product photograph on this site and on every marketplace listing is a real photograph of a real production copy — shot at the studio, in daylight, on the same shelf where we test the games. Nothing is composited, nothing is a 3D mock-up. What you see is what arrives in the box.
Yes, that is our cat. She is not included in the box, and she was paid in treats.
We work with independent bookshops, game stores, stationery shops and boutique retailers across Europe — and we now arrive with something none of your competitors can order from anyone else.
These games are our own IP, and we are the designer, publisher and manufacturer of them. No other distributor can offer them, nobody is undercutting you on price, and reprints, corrections or a custom quantity are one conversation rather than four.
A 23 × 16 × 5 cm, 270 g box at an approachable price — it faces out like a book and needs no demo table to sell. EAN-coded and GPSR-labelled, with manufacturer and EU contact details on the box and multi-language instructions behind a permanent QR code.
Two volumes are out, a third is being written and a second series is in design. A narrative game also holds a customer at the shelf far longer than another sticker sheet — and brings them back for the next case.
Alongside our own games, we curate a tightly edited range of paper craft, scene stickers and reader accessories from Chinese studios we trust — the same eye, applied to other people's work.
The name ChongYa (重涯) is a conversation between two worlds. Phonetically, it echoes "冲鸭 (Chong Ya!)" — a vibrant, modern Chinese call to action meaning "Go for it!" It is the spark of energy that begins every creative journey.
But look deeper, and you find the literal meaning of 重涯: "Overlapping Horizons." It represents the infinite layers of mountains and the boundless ridges of the imagination. We live in that duality: the kinetic energy of starting something new, and the patience of building a world one layer at a time.
We started by curating — hunting down tactile, design-led paper goods and bringing them to European shelves, because we believed a world lived through glass screens needs a physical anchor.
Making our own games was the natural next step. A mystery box is the most concentrated version of the thing we already cared about: an hour where the phone goes face-down, three or four people lean over the same table, and a world gets built out of paper and argument. We are still curators. We are now also authors.
We are a small, design-obsessed team in Beijing with a fine-arts background and a 90s-born perspective. We write the cases, draw the cards, argue about the endings, playtest until the puzzle is fair — and photograph the finished box on our own kitchen table.
Our aesthetic isn't a choice — it's a standard. We only publish what we would be proud to put on our own shelf.
Wholesale terms, translation rights, a sample copy for your buying team, or just a question about a case — we read everything ourselves.
We typically reply within 1–2 business days.
Beijing ChongYa Technology Co., Ltd.
Tongzhou District, Beijing, China