Mysterium Review
Summarized Review
Intro
There's something deliciously eerie about Mysterium, a cooperative deduction game where one player becomes a restless ghost trying to communicate through cryptic visions. Set in 1920s Scotland, this supernatural mystery tasks 2-7 players with solving a decades-old murder before time runs out. The ghost can't speak—only share dreamlike vision cards—while the other players act as mediums interpreting these otherworldly clues.
With its 7.2/10 rating and roughly 42-minute play time, Mysterium strikes an appealing balance between accessibility and intrigue. The game feels approachable enough for families and casual groups, though it rewards creative thinking and good communication. You won't need a PhD in game theory to enjoy it, but you'll definitely need an open mind and a willingness to embrace the absurd.
How It Plays
The setup feels like preparing for an actual séance. Each medium gets assigned a secret combination of suspect, location, and murder weapon cards. The ghost player knows these assignments but must guide each medium to their correct answers using only vision cards—gorgeous, surreal artwork that could mean absolutely anything.
Each round represents an hour of this supernatural investigation, and you've got seven hours total. The ghost hands vision cards to each medium, then flips a two-minute sand timer. Mediums scramble to interpret their visions and place their tokens on suspects, locations, or weapons depending on what phase they're in. Other players can vote on whether they agree with these guesses, earning clairvoyancy points for correct predictions.
If you guess right, you advance to the next phase. Guess wrong, and you're stuck trying again next hour with additional vision cards. The pressure builds as the clock ticks down. Once everyone successfully identifies their three elements—or time runs out in failure—the game moves to its climactic finale.
The endgame gets especially tense. The ghost reveals the true culprit by giving final vision cards, but mediums only see these clues based on how many clairvoyancy points they earned. The most perceptive players get more information before everyone votes on the killer's identity. Get it right, and the ghost finds peace. Get it wrong, and the mystery remains unsolved.
Highlights
The artwork absolutely steals the show. Every vision card looks like it escaped from a fever dream—melting clocks, floating umbrellas, mysterious figures in fog. These aren't literal clues but impressionistic puzzles that spark wild interpretations. Watching players connect a card showing red roses to a suspect in a crimson dress creates those wonderful "aha!" moments that make the game sing.
Mysterium nails the cooperative tension better than most games in the genre. Everyone succeeds or fails together, but individual progress varies dramatically. You might solve your mystery in three rounds while your friend struggles with the same suspect for five hours. This creates natural drama without the bitter frustration of direct competition.
The communication dynamic feels genuinely unique. Ghost players develop their own visual language and learn each medium's interpretive style. Some players think literally while others embrace abstract connections. A good ghost adapts their card choices accordingly, creating a surprisingly personal experience.
The scalability works remarkably well across different group sizes. Smaller groups get more intimate problem-solving, while larger groups create delightful chaos as everyone shouts theories and interpretations. The voting mechanism keeps non-active players engaged throughout.
Criticisms
The ghost role can feel frustrating, especially with groups that think very differently than you do. You'll hand over what seems like a perfect clue—a card with a prominent knife pointing to the murder weapon—only to watch your medium confidently select a completely unrelated suspect. Some sessions turn into exercises in mind-reading rather than logical deduction, which doesn't work for everyone.
The difficulty balance swings wildly depending on your group's wavelength. Some combinations of ghost and mediums click immediately, solving everything with time to spare. Others struggle to make any progress, leading to anticlimactic failures where half the group never advances past the suspect phase. There's no elegant way to adjust this mid-game.
The finale, while thematically satisfying, can feel disconnected from the main game's collaborative spirit. After working together for most of the experience, suddenly you're voting based on limited information and hoping for the best. It's dramatic, sure, but sometimes feels more like random chance than earned victory.
Conclusion
Mysterium works best with groups that enjoy creative interpretation over rigid logic. If your friends love debating abstract art, spinning elaborate theories, and embracing beautiful chaos, this game will become a regular request. Families with older kids, casual game groups, and anyone looking for a gateway into cooperative gaming should definitely give it a try.
Skip it if your group prefers concrete clues and systematic deduction. Players who get frustrated by ambiguity or need every game element to feel perfectly fair might find Mysterium more maddening than mysterious. But for everyone else, this ghostly puzzle offers something genuinely special—a game where the journey matters more than the destination, and the best moments come from shared confusion rather than individual brilliance.
About this Game
In the 1920s, Mr. MacDowell, a gifted astrologer, immediately detected a supernatural being upon entering his new house in Scotland. He gathered eminent mediums of his time for an extraordinary séance, and they have seven hours to make contact with the ghost and investigate any clues that it can provide to unlock an old mystery.
Unable to talk, the amnesiac ghost communicates with the mediums through visions, which are represented in the game by illustrated cards. The mediums must decipher the images to help the ghost remember how he was murdered: Who did the crime? Where did it take place? Which weapon caused the death? The more the mediums cooperate and guess well, the easier it is to catch the right culprit.
In Mysterium, a reworking of the game system present in Tajemnicze Domostwo, one player takes the role of ghost while everyone else represents a medium. To solve the crime, the ghost must first recall (with the aid of the mediums) all of the suspects present on the night of the murder. A number of suspect, location and murder weapon cards are placed on the table, and the ghost randomly assigns one of each of these in secret to a medium.
Each hour (i.e., game turn), the ghost hands one or more vision cards face up to each medium, refilling their hand to seven each time they share vision cards. These vision cards present dreamlike images to the mediums, with each medium first needing to deduce which suspect corresponds to the vision cards received. Once the ghost has handed cards to the final medium, they start a two-minute sandtimer. Once a medium has placed their token on a suspect, they may also place clairvoyancy tokens on the guesses made by other mediums to show whether they agree or disagree with those guesses.
After time runs out, the ghost reveals to each medium whether the guesses were correct or not. Mediums who guessed correctly move on to guess the location of the crime (and then the murder weapon), while those who didn't keep their vision cards and receive new ones next hour corresponding to the same suspect. Once a medium has correctly guessed the suspect, location and weapon, they move their token to the epilogue board and receive one clairvoyancy point for each hour remaining on the clock. They can still use their remaining clairvoyancy tokens to score additional points.
If one or more mediums fail to identify their proper suspect, location and weapon before the end of the seventh hour, then the ghost has failed and dissipates, leaving the mystery unsolved. If, however, they have all succeeded, then the ghost has recovered enough of its memory to identify the culprit.
Mediums then group their suspect, location and weapon cards on the table and place a number by each group. The ghost then selects one group, places the matching culprit number face down on the epilogue board, picks three vision cards — one for the suspect, one for the location, and one for the weapon — then shuffles these cards. Players who have achieved few clairvoyancy points flip over one vision card at random, then secretly vote on which suspect they think is guilty; players with more points then flip over a second vision card and vote; then those with the most points see the final card and vote.
If a majority of the mediums have identified the proper suspect, with ties being broken by the vote of the most clairvoyant medium, then the killer has been identified and the ghost can now rest peacefully. If not, well, perhaps you can try again...
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