Mysterium review: "Worthy of any board game night, spooky or not"

When the living are left clueless over a 1920s murder case, who better to call than a band of mediums to contact the amnesiac ghost of the victim, whose only method of communication is surrealist dreamscapes? Mysterium is a game of drawing meaning from the abstract, but with a high-stakes murder mystery at its heart, tight time constraints, and the vaguest clues imaginable, it's nothing short of a chaos-fuelled mystery romp to rival the best board games out there.

Mysterium takes cues from classic games like Dixit or Clue, and massages them into a highly thematic, cooperative challenge for up to seven players, making it worthy of even the most crowded board game night. It's a game of getting into each other's heads to decipher the indecipherable before the link to the other side withers, and the ghost is left to wander limbo for eternity.

Mysterium features & design

• Decipher cryptic, dreamlike clues from a ghost to learn about their murder
• Work toward individual goals, before deciphering the final clues through a secret vote
• Simple, repetitive gameplay loop that's easy enough to teach

Players in Mysterium take on the role of Psychics, tasked with solving a murder. One player – usually the most experienced – assumes the role of the murdered Ghost who draws a hand of vision cards. Their challenge lies in presenting these surreal visions to the Psychics, so they might narrow down a list of suspects, locations, and murder weapons. The catch being this: the Ghost can neither comment, nor gesture to give hints. Thanks to the Ghost's inability to communicate in any meaningful way, and a sorry case of post-unalive amnesia, the details of their death are hazy at best, making an accurate portrayal of events rather difficult.

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As such, they'll end up leading each Psychic through a bespoke set of suspects, locations and weapons that make up their personal goal. Each player's individual set is hidden behind the Ghost's D&D-esque screen, while the Psychics will have to make their guesses from a collection of face up cards on the table, among a host of red herrings.

The game is split into seven rounds, tracked using the included clock. Throughout, players shift along a central progress track, as well as the clairvoyancy track that comes into play during the endgame. Having ordered each player's individual goals behind their screen, the Ghost issues at least one vision card to each player hinting at the Character they must guess to progress.

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Psychics have two minutes, tracked with an hourglass timer, to make sense of their visions together. They then guess their suspect by placing their intuition pawn on it. At this point, Psychics may also place clairvoyancy tokens beside their compatriot's guesses, indicating whether they believe a guess to be right or wrong.

To conclude the first round, anyone who placed a clairvoyancy token tick-side up beside a correct guess, or cross-side up by an incorrect guess, moves up the clairvoyancy track. For those who guessed their suspect correctly, you'll discard the clues for that stage and shift your intuition pawn along the progress track so you can enter the next stage. An incorrect guess just means you're stuck on the current stage, though you're allowed to keep hold of any current clues.

For each round, the process simply repeats as you move at your own pace through the character, location, and object stages (in that order). Players are encouraged to help one another out since lagging players will lose the game for everyone once the connection to the spirit realm is severed.

Should all players have guessed correctly by the 7th hour, a bonus round plays out in order to suss out the true culprit. Here the Ghost issues just three clues face down, each one relating to either the character, location or object. The most clairvoyant players gain access to more clues, which they check privately and vote secretly on. The most clairvoyant of the lot then considers the votes, as well as their own intuition, and makes the final decision, either winning or losing the game for everyone. So, no pressure.

Gameplay

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• Surreal clues & mulligans level the playing field
• Players are rewarded for predicting wins/fails, but only if the endgame actually happens
• Superb pacing as everyone pools their brainpower in timed challenges over limited rounds

Mysterium hinges almost entirely on the Ghost's ability to form a coherent clue from the often incredibly nebulous – but utterly gorgeous – vision cards, along with the minimal chance that the Psychics just happen to be on the same wavelength. Like any guessing game, familiar parties may form their own background strategy over multiple games (always hinting at shapes first then colour, for example). But coming at it as a newbie can leave you just as dumbfounded as someone who has been playing for years. And we love a level playing field.

Taking the Ghost role can feel a little lonely, particularly when the other players all start blaming you for their occult ineptitudes. Thankfully, when the Ghost's hand of cards has thrown up an array of indeterminable tripe, the crow mechanic lets them discard their hand for a mulligan, so they can feel a little less helpless and a little more "Nevermore."

Clairvoyancy tokens add another layer to the proceedings, giving you multiple opportunities to pull out the old "I told you so" per round, so you're never short of an endorphin hit. The designers cleverly avoid the trappings of players hoarding these with a full replenish at round four, though their use can feel superfluous if the bonus round they contribute to is never actually reached. Similarly, in a two player game clairvoyancy is overlooked completely, watering the game down substantially along with the lack of a discussion element – which is frankly the most entertaining part.

Since the game is so intensely cryptic there's a definite sense of frustration when a wrong hunch holds you back. At the same time, it can be incredibly satisfying when you finally make a correct guess. Plus, wrong answers don't actively reduce scores and the number of players concentrating on helping you decipher your clues usually increases as the game goes on, which all add to the sense of lingering hope as the tension rises for those left behind. Which is what this game is all about, really.

Should you buy Mysterium?

Mysterium is a well-paced dive into the unknown that's sure to challenge even the most surreal thinkers among you and your game night pals. Mostly as it relies heavily on your actual real-life psychic abilities. Which, let's face it, is a rare skill.

That is not to say the game isn't exceptionally fun, with every failure revealing something new. The challenge of interpreting abstract images isn't going to be for everyone, though. It's a game with heaps of replay value for anyone who gets a kick out of analyzing the indefinite world of surrealist visuals. With multiple difficulty settings, and a higher player count than my entire game library combined, it's a great one for large groups of varying cognitive synchronicity.

Ratings

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

How we tested Mysterium

Our reviewer played the game multiple times with differing player counts and difficulty levels, and watched several playthroughs, to get a feel for how the game plays.

For a more in-depth look at our process, check out how we test board games or the GamesRadar+ reviews policy.

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