Mysterium Review – Who Knew Dying Was This Much Fun?

Mysterium is a cooperative game where one player takes the role of a vengeful ghost, helping the other players investigate their murder. The other players are ‘psychics,’ trying their best to help the police and avoid being busted by James Randi.

As a psychic, you’ll look at a board of suspects, locations, and murder weapons. Each suspect has a combination of these things they need to guess. With the help of the ghost, who’ll provide clues, you will need to guess the suspect the ghost is leading you towards.

Once you’re done with your guess, you can then place bets on the other psychics at the table. By either saying, you believe their guess is correct, or they’re a big fat phony.

Meanwhile, as the ghost, your toughest challenge is shutting up and watching these amateurs work. You know all the answers, and what the psychics are trying to guess, but can only communicate with them through vague picture cards.

Expect to hand over the perfect picture card, and then sigh heavily as the ‘psychic’ discusses some minute detail on the card you didn’t notice.

After seven rounds of this back and forth, you’ll either find out who the killer is, or it’s game over.

It’s a Funny Afterlife

Mysterium isn’t a complicated board game, and almost all of the legwork and complicated rules are curtained within the ghost role. Making it an excellent choice for introducing new players to modern board games.

The artwork on the vision cards is beautiful and macabre and will distract you. There are times when you’ll have to pause to show off a card you love or to take in all the details you don’t see at first glance.

These cards bring the fun of Mysterium, as they’re often absurdist. Because of that, they make creating concrete connections with the thing you need to guess difficult.

It’s a satisfying challenge, and sometimes it’s easy, like when you can match up colour palettes. But often it’s not, and trying to come up with the most obvious solution, when there are no obvious solutions, is fun. So is the look on your friend’s faces, when they have no idea what you’re getting at.

But when they do manage to read your mind and get the right outcome, there’s a real feeling of camaraderie. Where it feels like you’ve worked together to achieve something.

There may even be some high-fiving.

What’s So Bad About Being Dead?

Mysterium is an awesome game but in reality, by the time you set up the game, the murderer would have long fled the country. For a game this light, the setup is abnormally wrong. You need to perform unique setup steps for each player. This is one of the problems they’ve fixed in the sequel Mysterium Park.

However, once you’re playing, it’s a fantastic experience.

Although, there is one exception: the second-guessing mechanic. Placing a you’re-wrong token next to someone’s guess doesn’t sit well with the cooperative nature of the game. You want everyone to succeed, and betting against them feels against the spirit of the game.

Not to mention it introduces a bit of unnecessary bookkeeping between rounds. In an otherwise streamlined game, this overhead sticks out. Because of this, we often house-rule out this mechanic, as it adds nothing but annoyance.

The only other thing to keep in mind when thinking about Mysterium is its replayability. After you’ve played a few games, you’ll likely run into the same suspects, and vision cards. This is when you want to pick up an expansion.

Let’s Talk Expansions

There are two expansions for Mysterium, Mysterium: Hidden Signs, and Mysterium: Secrets and Lies.

Hidden Signs adds another 78 cards to the game. Meaning more vision, suspects, locations, and weapons. It helps to solve the replayability issues of the base game. There are no additional changes to the gameplay, so you can slot this expansion in without any changes to how you play.

Mysterium: Secrets and Lies also adds more cards, but in doing so also replaces the murder weapons with motive cards.

These new motive cards depict why you were killed, from a lost horse race to being sacrificed in a secret meeting. They’re grisly, and if you’re playing with children I wouldn’t recommend them, but they build perfectly upon Mysterium‘s already dour theme.

It also ups difficulty just enough for it to reach the not-too-hard, not-too-easy sweet spot. It’s a great expansion that I’d recommend if you have the base game.

Does it Still Hold Up?

Mysterium has been a household name for a long time, and for good reason. It’s easy to learn, easy to play, looks great on the table, and it’s the cooperative version of another great game: Dixit.

However, like Dixit, we’re well past the prime of Mysterium, and these older games have been surpassed by new and improved designs. It’s difficult to recommend Mysterium in 2021, as I believe it’s been surpassed by better games, like Mysterium Park.

That said though, Mysterium is one of my most played games over the years. So if you end up getting it, you won’t regret it.