Where Play Comes First: Gameorama, Lucerne's Interactive Game Museum
- Marcel Pflug
- Jul 5
- 3 min read
Switzerland is quietly rich in places that take play seriously. Some preserve a single object with obsessive care. Others throw open the doors and simply invite you to press start. Gameorama, in the middle of Lucerne, belongs firmly to the second kind, and it does the job with more variety than almost anywhere else in the country.
We wanted to introduce it, partly because it is a wonderful day out, and partly because it is the perfect counterpart to what we do at the Game Boy Museum.
An Interactive Game Museum in the Heart of Lucerne
Gameorama is an interactive game museum in Lucerne, at Hirschengraben 49, only about ten minutes on foot from the main station and a couple of minutes from Kasernenplatz. The principle is generous: you pay one entrance fee and the machines are yours. Pinball tables, arcade cabinets, a console area and a virtual reality arena are all set to free play, with no coins to feed.
Entry is CHF 25 for adults and CHF 20 for children aged six to fifteen, the museum floor is limited to two hours, and each time slot is capped at sixty visitors, so booking ahead is strongly recommended. Children under sixteen visit with an adult, which keeps the older, more delicate machines in good hands.
Far More Than Arcade Cabinets
What sets Gameorama apart is its sheer range. Alongside the museum floor sits a board-game cafe with a large lending library, a shop that also exhibits work by Swiss artists, and four escape rooms the team designed and built themselves. The calendar fills up with poker evenings, role-playing sessions, dedicated offerings for seniors and even prototype-testing nights where new games get their first real players.
The board-game cafe is the social heart of it. You can settle in with something to drink, pull a title off the shelves and stay as long as you like, since the cafe has no time limit at all. It is the kind of room where an hour quietly turns into three.
It means the place works for almost anyone: a family with small children, a group of friends after a rainy-day plan, board-game devotees who want to try before they buy, and people who would never call themselves gamers at all. Gameorama makes a point of easing newcomers in gently, with plenty of history and context along the way.
Built by Four Enthusiasts, Made to Last
Behind Gameorama stand four self-declared game enthusiasts, Angela, Jerome, Marco and Lukas, who were convinced Lucerne needed an interactive game museum of its own. That hands-on, personal spirit shows in how the collection is treated. The old machines are looked after so they keep working for years to come, and the museum happily gives a new home to donated pinball tables and vintage games that would otherwise gather dust in an attic.
The effort has not gone unnoticed. In 2026 Gameorama was named among the nominees for the new Swiss Museum Prize, a nod to just how much a small, independent house can achieve.
Play in Lucerne, Preserve Online
This is where our two worlds meet. Gameorama keeps gaming culture alive by switching it on and handing you the controller. The Game Boy Museum keeps it alive in a different way, by preserving and documenting one machine in complete, original condition so the record survives for good. Breadth and depth, the living game and the archived artefact: together they tell the fuller story.
It is also part of a bigger picture. Between Gameorama in Lucerne, kindred museums elsewhere and an online archive like ours, Switzerland has the makings of a real network of places devoted to gaming history. If a visit leaves you curious about the little grey handheld that started so many gaming lives, you can explore the whole original Game Boy story in our complete DMG-01 guide.
Plan Your Visit
Gameorama is open five days a week, from Wednesday to Sunday (during Lucerne summer holiday even 7 days a week); the exact times and the handful of annual holiday closures are listed on its own site. The board-game cafe is free to enter, with the usual expectation that you order something while you play, and there is no time limit there. For the museum itself, reserve a slot in advance to be sure of getting in.
You will find everything, from opening hours to group and school offerings, at gameorama.ch. Go with an afternoon to spare, and let yourself be surprised by how much of gaming history you can actually touch.
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