The mysterious Mysterium

      Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes and even CSI investigators are united by solving various crimes. Some use the elimination method, others rely on the latest scientific advances, but the Mysterium board game offers dreams as a way to solve a crime.

       Meeting at a table where the Mysterium board game is placed, players assume the role of psychics who will help a ghost living in an old, abandoned and rather scary building to remember which of the possible characters committed a gruesome murder. It sounds scary, but this game isn't just for wet October evenings. All the psychics work as a team, helping each other to find the innocent residents in order to catch the real culprit in the end.

       To prepare for the game, you need to determine the number of psychics, then, guided by the rules of the game, choose the difficulty level of the particular game, and lay out on the game table an appropriate number of possible killer character cards, murder location cards and murder weapon cards (for example, when playing with six psychics and one ghost, if medium difficulty level is selected, ten character, place and object cards are placed on the table, respectively). At the end of the table sits a ghost who has arranged his own set for each psychic, which also consists of an image, a place and an object. Then the ghost picks up seven cards from the deck of dream cards and sends dreams one by one to the psychic, who will help to find the real image from the beginning, then the place and then the object. The game will continue for seven rounds (think days in the context of the game), during which hopefully all the psychics have memorized their set. If even one psychic hasn't done it, the game is lost. At the end of the game, the players arrange the remaining characters, places and objects on the table into new sets, the ghost secretly chooses the one real one who is the killer, and then sends the last three dream cards to the psychics to recall the one true killer.

       The salt of the game lies in the dream cards, which feature beautiful, abstract, and sometimes hard-to-understand works of art. For example, one of the psychics has to guess that his character is a tailor, so the ghost sends him a dream of a castle with a beautiful garden and buttons instead of windows. The ghost, of course, hopes that the psychic will notice the buttons and realize that they are meant to point to the seamstress. But a possible psychic misunderstands the ghost and makes his guess in favor of the architect. Of course, the players discuss each other's choices and help arrive at the best solution for everyone. The ghost can lay down all the dream cards in his hand and take others three times during the game, because it often happens that none of the symbols found in the dreams correspond to the desired image, place or object.

       I've played this game with my soon-to-be-four-year-old daughter (with slightly tweaked rules, of course), and she really enjoyed both the interesting and colorful character cards, and of course, the beautiful dream cards. It really is art in the truest sense of the word! For the child, the fortune-telling balls of psychics seemed the most beautiful. When playing with adults, sometimes amusing situations arise when explaining the cards sent by the ghost. One psychic points to the apple depicted in the dream card and claims that the object is poison (thinking of the Snow White fairy tale), another says that the apple has needles stuck in it that look like the legs of a poisonous spider, another interjects that the apple is standing on a column that looks like candles that cause fire, but someone else says that the tones used in the card match the tones of the razor. A mess! The psychic has to decide for himself which guess is the most correct and try to understand the ghost's thought process (in this particular case, the candle turned out to be the right one).

       The board game "Mysterium" is a cooperative game, because everyone has to do their job, otherwise there will be no winner. Like it or not, this game has to be compared to other games in the co-op genre. In this case, I will use the example of a relatively small board game "Forbidden Desert". I don't believe in haunted buildings and psychic powers. I've never been in an abandoned house with a more like-minded person and never helped solve a murder. I say this to say that personally, while playing the Mysterium board game, I never worried that we would win, but at the same time, I didn't care if we lost. I saw this experience as an adventure with friends, during which we laugh, have a good time and try to outwit each other. Is Mysterium about these things? Definitely no! The game should be tense, dark and ultimately satisfying. On the other hand, neither I nor my friends had fun while playing Forbidden Desert. We are running for our lives in the heat of the desert, where we lack drinking water, and just like that, a storm is brewing that will soon bury us in deadly desert sand. We've all been too hot, thirsty, and the wind has blown some small but annoying object into our eyes. These are the things that we as humans find it easier to relate our emotions to.

       The board game "Mysterium" is a beautifully illustrated, high-quality and easy-to-play event game that allows players to feel themselves in a different role, laugh at amusing game situations and just as often look at the ghost with confusion and think: "What does he mean by that?"

       This game comes with the Mysterium: Hidden Signs expansion, which adds new cards to all four elements of the game.

Robert

Pictures: author.

The game can be purchased at the Brain Games store at K. Barona street 55 or at the online store: Mysterium , Mysterium: Hidden Signs

Rating Board Game Geek: 7.5