Mysterium
Ever thought yourself as an island, with nobody ever understanding what you are trying to say? Ever felt that no matter how painfuly you try, nobody seems to succeed or even try to communicate with you?
Well good! Because that is exactly how the player that plays the ghost in Mysterium feels like. A players VS the board game situation, Mysterium is a game that has rise to my top 5 favorite board games to play.
Combining the whacky "mind reading" of Dixit, the murder mystery of Clue and some amazing artwork, Mysterium is an extremely fun and addictive game.
The story is that years ago, in a mansion where literally everyone that was famous was invited, the buttler was murdered. Despite the efforts of the police, the case was closed and the murderer remained loose. When the blue player inherited the mansion, he noticed that the mansion appeared to be haunted. Lights flickering, objects moving, minor messages written in blood, you know, the small things.
Because the mansion is way too awesome to abandon, with awesome areas and a bitching internet connection, the blue player decided to become a medium in order to communicate with the ghost, and find out a way to help it. In the process he managed to uncover that the ghost was no other than the dead buttler, that cannot rest until his murderer is brought to justice. Sensing the opportunity for an amazing party story, the blue player decided to solve the closed case. To do so, he invited other famous and talented mediums (the rest of the players) to conduct a seance in the mansion on a date when the barrier between two worlds was so thin that the spirt would be able to communicate with more than just moving around stuff or flicking off the lights.
So, there you are, the game begins after you went through the process of establishing the spirit link, went through all the intermissions, on-hold spirt calls and the underworld secretary Darken Rahl. With the connection to the Buttler finally established, the game begins. But alas, you only have until dawn to solve the case.
What is Mysterium though?
Mysterium is a game in which the players are split into two groups. The psychics and the ghost.
Now, to do so, the game offers a board in which the ghost will place a suspect, a room and a murder item for each player, using the "board" as a barrier between the ghost and the players. Then you will split the cards in four groups, suspects, rooms and murder weapons on one hand, and visions or "random drug fueled paintings" as I like to call them on the other. The ghost will be drawing cards hidden from the visions deck behind its board, while the unused cards from the other three piles are just placed aside, waiting for the next game
You place the cards in play from the three first piles and place them face up in three seperate rows where the players can easilly view them, the ghost hides behind its barrier and the game is officially starting.
The game is split into three stages that are resolved with "rounds"
The game goes as follows
At first the players have to discover who their suspect is
Then which room their suspect did the murder and finally
with what item.
Should all players advanced through all three stages, then the final stage begins, but more on that later. First lets find out what each side has to do
The ghost:
Playing solo, the ghost has the hard task of trying to give clues to each player as to what their suspect/room/murder weapon is using the vision cards. Sounds easy right? Wrong!
The problem with this is twofold. On one hand you have to find a way to connect some random fever AND drug fueled abstract paintings to specific people, rooms or items for each of the players. On the other however, you are -very- much dependant on what cards you will draw from the pile, so picking them carefuly is key if you want to win. To "even" the odds the game offers you raven tokens, which you can use to select some or all of your cards, discard them and pick new ones. Problem is, the highest the difficulty you guys are playing it? the less crows you have.
Eventualy it boils down to how well you know your friends and how much you can both predict how they will interpret each card and how well they know -you- so they understand -why- you gave them a card.
Worst part? You are -not- allowed to talk, hint, or influence the game in any way. (Unless you are me. I roleplay as a poltergeist so sometimes I will give hints when they just dont get obvious things)
Yeah. Prepare to feel alone, missunderstood and convinced your friends are a bunch of monkeys
The Players
The players are racing the clock. Every time the ghost "judges" their result and either tells them they advance to the next stage or they need to re-pick, a round ends.
The game has a limited amount of rounds before it ends with -ALL- the players losing, so you have to make haste. Their objective is threefold.
First they have to correctly decipher the vision and choose their suspect/room/weapon carefully
Second they have to help other psychics do the same and finally
They must earn as many points as they can before the final stage of the game. The amount of points they have, dictacs how many cards of the "final" vision is shown to them, so the higher their points the bigger the chance of success.
The final tool the players have is four tokens, two agreement ones and two dissagreement ones. They can place those on their fellow psychic's choices if they agree or dissagree with them. And they can refresh those tokens at the fourth hour (round) of the game.
The players earn points by advancing to the next stage, correctly guessing if their team mates are right/wrong and by how many hours till dawn remained when they finished all three stages.
The Fourth and Final stage
IF, and that is a -big- if, the players manage to all complete all three stages before dawn, then we enter the final part of the game.
The ghost will have to choose which one from the suspects actually did it. He selects one of the player combinations he had in front of him as the main one.
You cannot mix and match, the choice is linear. If you pick for example player blue, and the choices you had for him were lets say
The General
Pool
Gun
Then your choice is all three of those.
As you decide the players clear the board and only have the combinations for each player on the game.
The ghost must then show only THREE visions to the players in order for them to guess the right combination
The higher the points each player has, the more of those three visions he gets to see, meaning you may end up very well having one player that has to decide with only one vision available to him.
The players decide in secret, or at least without talking or helping each other, and then the choice is revealed. If the majority picked right, all players win. If the majority did not, then the players lose.
So there you have it!
Mysterium. An -amazing- game to play. We have spent so many hours into this game we even got the passable PC steam port of it to play now that some of us are abroad for work. Despite the clear frustration this game can offer you, I have never once felt pressured or annoyed at a loss. With plenty of opportunities to poke fun of your friends and subsequently have them poke fun at you, the game is good lighthearted fun.
Except if you are the Ghost in which case you will spent most of the game like the Gif on the right, wondering if your friends are braindead or if you are actually a ghost
With a spooky theme and the artwork to back it up, most of the time you get into situations of impromptu semi-roleplaying with the ghost knocking shit from the table while staring intensely at the rest claiming "I am doing ghost stuff" and things like that.
What are your thoughts on Mysterium? Love it? Adore it? Are you perhaps a ghost seeking help? Tell us @Twitter
