Mysterium review

In Mysterium, one player takes the role of ghost while everyone else represents a Psychic. It’s a co-op board game where everyone comes together to solve the mystery of who murdered the ghost, in which location and with what weapon. Joshua aptly describes it as adult cluedo.

Our Couple’s Review on Mysterium

Anjali (8/10)

I will say that I was a bit prejudiced before we played Mysterium since it used similar rules to Dixit. The games rules were pretty straightforward too – the ghost gives Psychics visions (cards with images) so that they may identify the murderer, the location and the weapon. As this happens in stages, Psychics advance when they guess / vote correctly.

Mysterium is definitely best played with 4-7 players including the ghost. The box comes with its own organizer, which makes keeping the pieces separate that much easier, not to mention quickly setting up a game. The only way it could be faster is keeping the ghost’s and the players cards together for the various objectives to identify, but I think that’s still relatively negligible when everyone pitches in for set-up.

Why is it so fun? The fun comes from the social aspect of the game – from helping other Psychics, to watching as Psychics accuse the ghost of not doing well enough, but being the ghost can be pretty tough in itself. The arguments, the dissent, to finally finding out that you’re correct gives you a great dopamine rush.

Joshua (7.5/10)

Adult cluedo describes Mysterium really well from Joshua’s thought process, and the game feels really good both from a player and the ghost’s perspective. As a ghost you often have to guess whether your vision is going to be heard correctly, and also have a solid poker face as you hear the Psychics argue on what to vote and why.

Joshua agrees that Mysterium is best played with at least 5 players. The game does run pretty smoothly with adjusted rules for 2-3 players, but the loss of mechanics isn’t quite worth it.

While being the ghost has its own element to it, Joshua isn’t the biggest fan of having one player sit out, considering Clue-do’s mechanics allows for everyone to sit at the table and guess who committed the murder, in which location and with what weapon. Having said that though, both games play out very differently and Mysterium has a really fun social element in comparison.

Joshua has suggested playing Mysterium several times, and especially as one of the games to play with a crowd that likes simple board games and socialising. It takes about an hour to finish a game, depending on how well the Psychics are able to understand their Visions.

Recommended Table Size

While Mysterium has lots of cards and various items of play, you can set it up on a rectangular coffee table 64 x 115 cm or something of a similar size with comfortable seating all around. The item that takes the most amount of space depending on the number of players present, are the objectives (person, location, weapon).

You will need to have a chair or area to keep the extras in the box - we pulled and put items back as we needed when we set-up again for Phase 2!

Rulebook vs Video Tutorial

We HIGHLY recommend watching a video tutorial to learn Mysterium if you don’t enjoy confusing rulebooks.

The Rulebook’s structure threw us off initially. The rulebook goes through how to play the game generically, assuming you have 4+ players. There’s no note or mention that there is a change in set-up for 2/3 player game, until you get to the last page.

We would have loved a rules in brief card that told us the change for 2 & 3 player set-up and a separate one for turn orders which would be useful. Regardless, explaining the game is quite simple, so also playing it.

Play To Win Mysterium is the tricky bit, with the visions the ghost provides and how you interpret them.

As a gist, the differences in rules for 2/3/4+ player games -

Play

To Win Mysterium is the tricky bit, with the visions the ghost provides and how you interpret them.

As a gist, the differences in rules for 2/3/4+ player games -

2 Player Games

For a 2-player game - Changes in regular setup

Phase 1 -

1. Each player plays two Psychics
2. None of the Clairvoyancy items are used (Clairvoyancy Track, Level Tokens or Tokens)

Phase 2 –

1. Assemble 2 more groups (Character, Location, Object) apart from the ones you chose
2. For the shared vision, the Ghost places the 3 vision cards face up.

The Psychic must now choose one culprit out of the 4 options based on the vision, voting using their intuition pawn.

2-player game - Turn Order

Phase 1 (Personal Objective - 7 rounds) –

1. Vote for Character using intuition pawn, Vote for each psychic (you have 2)
2. When correct, place the card in the respective Psychic Sleeve and advance to location
3. Repeat steps 1-2 for location and weapon cards.

If successful within 7 rounds, advance to Phase 2.

Phase 2 (Voting) –

1. Assemble two more groups from the remaining cards leftover with the ghost’s guidance.
2. Set aside the progress boards
3. Set up the scenarios as groups (Character, Location, Weapon)
4. Ghost chooses one scenario as the correct one
5. Ghost places the 3 vision cards face up
6. Using only one intuition pawn, vote for one of the scenarios

If correct, you win the game!

3 Player Games

For a 3-player game - Changes in regular setup

Phase 1 –

1. Each player plays two Psychics
2. None of the Clairvoyancy items are used (Clairvoyancy Track, Level Tokens or Tokens)

Phase 2 –

1. As there are already 4 groups to choose from, there is no need to assemble more groups.
2. For the shared vision, the Ghost places the 3 vision cards face up.
3. The Psychics vote openly and discus to identify the correct group.

Once they do so, they both place their intuition pawns on it.

For a 3-player game - Turn Order

Phase 1 (Personal Objective - 7 rounds) –

1. Vote for Character using intuition pawn, Vote for each psychic (you have 2)
2. When correct, place the card in the respective Psychic Sleeve and advance to location
3. Repeat steps 1-2 for location and weapon cards.

If successful within 7 rounds, advance to Phase 2.

Phase 2 (Voting) –

1. Set aside the progress boards
2. Set up the scenarios as groups (Character, Location, Weapon)
3. Ghost chooses one scenario as the correct one
4. Ghost places the 3 vision cards face up
5. Both Psychics vote openly and can discuss which scenario is correct
6. Using one intuition pawn each, vote for one of the scenarios

If correct, you win the game

4 Player Games

For a game with 4+ players - Turn Order in Short

Phase 1 (Personal Objective - 7 rounds) –

1. Ghost gives Psychics vision cards face down, Start the timer when all Psychics are looking at their visions
2. Vote for a Character using intuition pawn, till the timer runs out
3. Start a new timer and vote (if you wish to) on whether other Psychics are correct or wrong using Clairvoyancy tokens, till the timer runs out
4. The Ghost reveals which Psychics are correct
5. Resolve Clairvoyancy Levels by adding a level if you guessed correctly, and discard used Clairvoyancy tokens
6. When correct, place the card in your Psychic Sleeve and advance to location
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for Location and Weapon. At the beginning of round 5, Psychics get their used Clairvoyancy tokens back.

If successful within 7 rounds, advance to Phase 2.

Phase 2 (Voting)

1. Set aside the progress boards
2. Set up the scenarios as groups (Character, Location, Weapon)
3. Ghost chooses one scenario as the correct one
4. Ghost will choose, shuffle and place the 3 vision cards face down
5. Closed voting begins – Reveal vision cards one by one, based on Clairvoyancy levels (refer to the Clairvoyancy Track). Psychics vote based on the visions available to them
6. Using the Clairvoyancy tokens, vote for the corresponding group number and place it in your Psychic sleeve.
7. Psychics with lower clairvoyancy levels pass their sleeves to Psychics with the next highest clairvoyancy level
8. Repeat steps 5-8 till all Psychics have voted
9. Psychic(s) with the highest clairvoyancy level will tally the votes.
10. The scenario selected is based on majority vote. If there is no majority, the Psychic with the highest Clairvoyancy votes for the scenario.

If correct, you win the game!

How it actually played out

There is a major difference between how the game feels when you’re playing with up to 3 players vs 4+ players and the difference is INSANE. The first game went surprisingly smoothly, but as it was with 3 players, there wasn’t much excitement to talk about… so we’ll talk about the time we had our friends over and played with all 7 of us!

Set-up and playtime

Set-up in Mysterium takes around 15-20 minutes between finding the cards, the ghost sorting out their screen and setting up for the game. Each game usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour. The last time we played Mysterium, we had 6 psychics and the ghost, and it was an absolute riot.

Anjali: Alright, do we want to play easy, medium or hard?
Everyone (discussing): Easy - No way, we should go the whole hog! hard!! - Easy please - How hard could it be??
Anjali: Well, since we’re kind of split, let’s do medium, shall we?
Joshua: Oh boy.

As vision cards got passed around, you could see us dissolving into arguments between who was right or wrong. We reached the height of excitement when all of us had only ONE CHANCE left to get the location and weapon right. It was tight.

Anjali: Hm, I dunno, maybe my location’s this creepy house?
Psychics: Well, if that’s yours then what about mine? Mine’s got creepy elements…
Anjali: What about these rabbits then? I was so sure it felt kinda Alice in Wonderland
Psychics: Couldn’t be - yours should be this dusty old bedroom with spiders.
Anjali: Yeah, but there’s no cobwebs though…
Psychics: Well then we’ll see which one of us is right!

Meanwhile Joshua: Desperately looking through cards for more hints and passing them out if he saw we got his vision wrong

The voting phase was of course where we all had fun arguing who was right and wrong. You could see friendships getting torn apart over everyone’s votes. And psychics reaching for other tokens to vote when someone claimed they were wrong.

It was one of the best co-op games we played, and one of the most fun for Mysterium. As you can imagine, having barely managed to get through the first half of the game, in the final voting phase we failed our ghost. And so Joshua roams the ether, waiting for more psychics to hear his plea and find the true culprit!

Our preferred strategies

Anjali’s suggestion for Mysterium is to learn telepathic communication and communicate directly with the ghost because sometimes, the connection is a real stretch… oftentimes, she looks at colours / main objects on the vision cards and tries to find similarities between the objects or their meaning or feeling, in the hopes of getting it right. It works… sometimes.

Joshua’s suggestion as the ghost is to hope you’re lucky and get good cards or use crows to gamble for better cards. Being the ghost isn’t an easy job in any way…

We do suggest picking someone with a good poker face as the ghost. As the ghost can hear everyone’s discussions and watch as they vote, it can be really difficult to keep a straight face and not give away clues.

How many games until you’re Psychic?

The game feels pretty good for both veterans by the second round and we’d say the question should be “How many players till it feels good, and we highly advise having a minimum of 4 players (including the ghost)“

Publisher and their other games

Libellud is the publisher for Mysterium and they’ve made a few different versions of the game. The one we’ve played is the Mysterium Manor, but, if you’re into funfairs, you’re in luck, as there’s a version of Mysterium where you explore the FunFair.

They’ve also made other fun games like Dixit, which has 3 different base games. Dixit, Dixit Odyssey and Stella - Dixit Universe - and to 9 expansion packs all compatible with the base games. We highly recommend Dixit if you enjoy guessing games with great visuals!

Apart from these two great titles, they’ve also published Dice Forge, which is a fantastic engine-building game, well worth the hype and is great fun to play.

They’ve also published other games like Harmonies, Seasons, Shadows, Obscurio and many more to tickle your fancy!

Final readings

We’d highly recommend this as a nice relaxed game in the evenings, or, for better atmosphere, in the evenings with rain and cups of loose-leaf tea to pretend you’re all actual Psychics!

If you’re wondering what a co-op board game is, we’ve written an article on exactly that. Give it a read if you’d like to know more about co-op board games, our personal suggestions, and other co-op board games that we’ve got our eyes on, right here!