Mysterium Review

welcome to john gets games today i'll be reviewing tajamnicha damostpo or mysterium if you don't understand my really bad polish this is an asymmetric fully cooperative game brimming with logic and deduction first i'll go over the rules and then i'll jump into my review before i explain how to play mysterium i need to point out that there are two different versions of this game there was an original ukrainian version and then a polish version that came out which is the one you see in front of you however every time i've played this game i realize i've used the ukrainian rules so i'm going to teach it using those that ukrainian rule set and at the end of the rules explanation i'll explain the key rules differences between the two the general idea for this game is there is this old house that is being haunted by the ghost who is the ghost player and this ghost is stuck in this house because it can't leave this earthly realm until somebody figures out who did this really old murder so the owner of the house wants to get rid of this ghost because it's annoying and he brings in three psychic investigators for a full week to figure out who did this murder a long time ago mechanically what that means is each of these psychics are associated with a single person place and object from the available options that we have in front of us so red has their own specific set green has their own set and blue is going to have their own set it also means that three of the people places and objects are not associated with any of the detectives they're just there to make it harder to figure out which one of these locations people and objects are the ones people want so this gives you an idea of what the ghost players area is going to look like obviously these cards will be face down so that the detectives can't see but you can see a person place and object is associated with each of the three detective colors now we start out having the ghost player try to make each person figure out who their person is once a detective has figured out that person on a subsequent turn they're going to work on their place and once they figure out the place they're going to try and figure out their object this is done using this big deck of dream cards now the ghost player always has a hand of seven cards and as you can see on these cards there's all sorts of surrealistic things going on like lots of different objects and colors and very odd dream like things now the ghost player is going to look at their hand of seven cards and then they're going to look at the people first for all three of the detectives and they get to choose the order in which they're going to give these cards so these cards are the dream that they're giving now they can give one to seven cards to that detective but they want to give only enough to help that detective figure out who they are for instance this card right here has musical notes on it so i might feel like giving this card to the red player because they have a conductor we've got this card with a line and a woman looking off to the sunset that's kind of adventury so maybe i would give that to the detective the green detective because of this um kind of adventure explorer lady and oh this you know bunch of floating candles down a staircase that's kind of like a magician magic so i might give this to the blue player now i might give just a single card to these people or i might give two cards to try and build an association perhaps with a color scheme associated with the card or various things because i could give this to the musician it's got music notes but it also has keys and shoes and those might be things that the detectives are going to be thinking about they're not just going to see the music notes they're going to see everything going on and they might not figure out what the reason you gave them this particular card so adding a second card might help guide them in that direction once the ghost player has given a clue let's say they give this card to the red player now they draw back up to seven cards and they can keep giving these dreams to the different players until every player has received a dream one thing to note in the normal difficulty game the ghost player is allowed to up to three times in this game ditch their entire hand and draw seven new cards as kind of a helping mechanism if you just have cards that are not helping you out at all based on the difficulty setting that you're playing this game at you will be able to do this more or less times once the ghost player has given dreams to all of the detectives then they all wake up essentially and discuss their dreams back and forth with each other so they're able to show the cards that they were given to each other and then they collectively try to figure out which person they are associated with so again we have blue who has these floating candles they might be thinking oh that is kind of magiciany so maybe it's this magician however we have a nun and uh nuns are often in churches and churches really like candles so maybe that would make sense but then we have a bear trap on this card as well and bear trap that might go along with an explorer so they might be kind of thinking okay well let's let's move on to the next card and see the different options we have there we've got this woman and she's exploring there's a big lion there so that seems pretty solid people might be like yeah i'm pretty sure that green is associated with this explorer so they take this token or if green is happy with this it's a collective discussion but ultimately it's the player who's associated with that color who makes the decision and they put their token down here next maybe we come to red and we look at the things that we have going on here and we might see the musical notes which makes us us think conductor but we've also got keys and shoes and well i mean that this is a school teacher lady over here a school teacher she might have keys the shoes might indicate there's lots of children but let's say that people figure nah that's probably music and let's say these guys uh we think that the candles are more associated with nuns than they are with uh magicians so once everybody has decided that these are the picks they have we go and ask the ghost if we're right as we of course know in this setting the red player would have figured it out correctly so uh what we would do is take this card here we put this back we get rid of the dream card for the red player and then what we've been doing is just keeping this card in front of the red player to show the rules don't specifically say to do that but it's made sense to us so we know that the red player is associated with this conductor we look at the green player and we say that's also correct so this card would go away and this would go in front of the green but then we go over to blue and the ghost says nope you guys are wrong so what happens now is we take this blue token it comes back and the blue player is going to keep this dream card uh un like the green and red player who lost theirs at this point we look at the day track and we push it forward once to show that we are moving on to the second night and we're gonna start the whole process over again however this time the ghost is going to give a more clues to the blue player to have the blue player figure out which one of these four characters they are now blue knows that they're not the nun so actually they're just thinking about these three characters here uh but then when the ghost gives the hints for the green and the red player the ghost is going to instead be giving clues to have the green and red player figure out which one of the locations that they are associated with so at some point it's possible that a player will have figured out their person their location and after the location they go on to try to figure out which object they might have all three of those figured out while other players don't at that point that player is going to stop getting dreams from the ghost and that player is just going to help the other players catch up to where they are once each detective has figured out through the process of each of these nights what their person place and object are associated with the murder we can now go into the final phase where the ghost tells us which of these three people and in what place and with what object did the murder so we see i have the marker set to six that means we actually have two turns collectively to figure out who did it so let's talk about it this final phase of the game is a little different than before all the detectives are going to go to sleep but they're going to have a collective communal dream they're all going to dream the same thing and what the ghost player needs to do is they look at their hand of seven cards and they need to pick out three cards exactly three to point at which one of these people did the murder now one of these cards needs to be associated with the person one of them needs to be associated with the place and one of them needs to be associated with a thing however when the ghost player gives those three cards to the detectives they do not tell them which card is associated with the person placer thing the detectives need to figure that out for themselves for instance this dream right here now uh there's a couple different ways that i can see already that these could be interpreted for instance we could look over here and say that this organ right here is full of different pipes and this underground layer with a bunch of glassware and stuff those have kind of pipey things and organs can sometimes be in enclosed brick type areas we've got this dracula vampire kind of character and this magician and i don't know they're both wearing black suits they both kind of look like they might be performing and then we've got this card here which is just really green and this vial of poison is green we might also look over here and say okay well this organ is music and the conductor does music uh this fork has shark tines on it and we've got a vampire who has sharp teeth but we also have this gargoyle with sharp teeth and then we have this pool area here and i don't know i might not really be able to figure out how that's associated maybe it's a color thing and spoiler alert when i pull these out of that hand i associate it with the red card here and for those exact reasons we've got the music for the pipes we've got sharp teeth dracula guy and then you can also just go up color scheme you could say these colors are very similar in color schemes and you know dreams color that might come into play now uh before we the ghost reveals who what actually it is all the players have to agree on which interpretation it is and they do that by putting their pieces collectively on the person they say now let's just pretend that they were not seeing the obvious connections and they put their markers on the incorrect one in this case the ghost player would just say that they're wrong this dream would go away and they would go on to the last night in this particular case and they would get to do it again but they would only have two different options to choose from if however they had chosen the correct one then they would have won the game would be over and the ghost is so happy it leaves the house and goes on to the next plane of existence now that you know how to play the ukrainian rule set for this game i'm going to briefly go through the three significant rules differences between the ukrainian and the polish the first is that the ghost player in the polish version only plays with six cards in their hand instead of seven the second difference is that the detectives figure out the object first then the location and finally the person and the final difference is that in the final round once people have figured out their person place and object you get rid of all the objects and places you just have the three people in this case that are potential suspects and the ghosts the ghost gives them a collective dream however they they give them a dream with some number of cards from their hand but then they also show them the cards in their hand they didn't use and the players need to figure out just which of the people specifically those cards are associated with so the final dream has nothing to do with the location or the object and obviously if you don't figure out who the final murderer was in either the ukrainian or polish version after seven turns or seven nights then you all collectively lose and the guy who owns the house kicks you out and he's gonna invite some new psychic detectives the following week and maybe they'll be better than you for my review of mysterium i'm gonna explain my thoughts on each item in this list starting at the top and working my way down so let's start with the positives my favorite part about this game positive number one is how you actually feel like you're interpreting dreams it might just seem like oh some players giving you cards and you're trying to figure out correlations but it's very easy to fall into the theme of what's supposed to be happening where you're just like guys guys guys i just had the craziest dream last night there was this crazy rat with stuff all over them and like dead cockroaches around and then there were these buildings with buttons on them and this weird guy with wings on it and and everyone is sharing these crazy dreams back and forth and then they're trying to figure out what they mean it's just it's such a solid theme integration into mechanics it just blew me away from the first moment i started playing this game i was like holy cow i feel like we're discussing our dreams so very cool next up is positive number two and that is that there is no quarterbacking or alpha player syndrome in this game for those who don't know it's a problem that a lot of cooperative games have where one player either gets the game better or is just louder and they tell everybody what they should do on their turn and the most frustrating thing is that oftentimes this player is correct and so you just kind of find yourself not playing like this person is kind of playing your game instead and you're kind of spectating and that is not a problem in this game at all because there's no way to actually know what your dream means until the ghost reveals it you could have somebody be very forceful and be very like like energetically think that they've got the right answer but somebody else can make an equally passioned uh argument for a completely different interpretation and i just really like that you can't just be like oh well so and so they're right again i guess like in other cooperative games so i really like that you could just make your own decisions ultimately it's up to you where you put that little pawn but it's great you know hearing other people's feedback but it's on you positive number three has to do with the asymmetric gameplay in this game where players are doing very different things whether the ghost or the detectives but they're trying to get to the same end goal of winning together uh the ghost player has a kind of stressful experience i mean it's it's fun stress but you are just looking at this hand of seven cards and usually it's not like what are the best cards well you know what's this great card i can give to these people it's more like what's the least bad option i have like i just i have seven cards and i've got nothing for all these people i often found myself giving maybe one extra card hint to somebody because i desperately needed to draw more cards to have an option for somebody else like oh the red players almost got it so i'm going to give them these two cards hopefully the second one doesn't scream up too much i just need card draw so it's got this very interesting game going on where it's kind of like you and you feel like it's all on you and the pressure's there because you know you're the one giving the cards out but the flip side is the detectives they got this completely other kind of game it's almost like the detectives are playing a co-op and the ghost is playing a single-player game but they all want to win together because the detectives they're the ones discussing back and forth and what about this interpretation what about oh wait wait that one oh i just noticed there's a scarf in the corner on this one and there's a scarf on this you know just that kind of stuff is very communal over here and the ghost player kind of feels very solitary but that kind of goes with the theme too a little ghost players like in the walls like trying to figure out how to you know pull the strings for these detectives anyway both roles played very fun i've played them both twice i play the game five times so not sure how the math works out but i've done both of them a couple times and they're both great and the fourth positive is how easy this game is to teach and play with non-gamers when you think about it this is kind of like a meaty party game uh i've done this at least once over the holidays when i played with my family where i just set up as the ghost put the screen in front of me started looking my hand and without really telling them anything else just started giving a dream out i gave it to the first person and i just said you went to sleep here is your dream they're surrealistic cards disregard everything but the people one of these six people is specifically assigned to you trying to figure out what these two cards mean together to tell you who the person is and that's it and then i go back and i give the next cards out and i don't even worry about explaining well next you're gonna do locations next you're gonna do the items i wait a turn or two to kind of feed these things in and you just can just jump right in i played with uh my mother who likes games but doesn't like complicated games and my uncle who does not like board games at all and he ended up being the most excited one near the end of the game trying to figure out how this stuff works together so i'm just really impressed with how this game plays with non-gamers gamers as well it's definitely can be a gamery game if you ratchet up the difficulty but specifically playing with people who are not familiar or people who are uh intimidated by games with lots of rules this one works really well for my neutral point i want to discuss the ghost players burden they have so much information that they need to know in order to correctly give clues and the game does not do a very good job of providing them with a way to do that you kind of have to like make little piles of cards with like the red detective blue detective and you're kind of peeking at them and peeking at this and then you're grabbing your hand to seven cards and looking at all those and wait who was this and it's difficult especially when there's so many little things on each card uh and just looking at those you're not going to play very well as a ghost doing that especially considering you need to know what the options are that are not associated with any players so you don't give a bad clue that's amazing for red and then you realize that oh there's another one out there it's going to be it's going to clash so what we did is we actually made two player screens so far i'm going to briefly show them really quickly the first one is something that really anybody can make this took like 20 minutes or so we just hacked up a cardboard box and scotch tape some paper around it and it really lets you see every option that you need so you can put little color discs down on the bottom for the person place an object and also you can see the um the sets that are not being used by anybody and you can really just look around and make sure that this hand of cards that you have you're going to give the best clues you're not doing it in order in player order or anything like that because there is no player order you can say oh this is good for this give the dream draw up new cards another great bonus to this actually is as a ghost player for me anyway it can be difficult to not give things away with my facial expressions especially when they're so close and then they go away from it or something you know something that they they're supposed to be getting and i'm just and i found myself kind of hiding behind the player screen like and they're like what's wrong with it i'm like oh it's nothing it's nothing i'm just trying not to give away any clues it's like i'm hiding in the walls now this works very well but my girlfriend decided she wanted something that is a lot prettier and she spent a bunch of time making this amazing player screen and it might seem like exhibition but i want to show you that there are really great options that you can do to really enhance the gameplay where you can see all the different options and then we got like nice pretty stuff out here so it almost feels like you're a ghost hiding in the walls now i don't want to sound like i'm just tooting my girlfriend's horn i really want to show you that you can do a simple uh solution to really make the ghost player's life a lot easier and a lot more fun or you can just kind of go crazy and make something that's really beautiful and this kind of stuff really adds to the game and i really wish that the base game had come with something like it and now the one negative point for mysterium has to do with these two clashing rule sets with the polish and the ukrainian uh on the face of it that's annoying in general because you're like well which rule set should i play but a little bit deeper than that one of them i think is vastly superior and i'm worried about people playing the other so i taught them rules using the ukrainian that's the one that i played for the most part uh but the flip side to the polish one is there are three main differences that i explained and the first couple don't really matter the order in which you do you know people place object or object place people it doesn't matter the ghost having six or seven cards it's a minor difference but that final stage like the end game where you figured out who what and where everybody's associated with and you have to figure out who the killer is it really just seems like the ukrainian version is vastly better than the polish version you know the polish one you just get rid of the place and the object and you just do the people round again but it's communal that's wow that's so uninspired versus the ukrainian one where you have this whole new kind of like end game where you have to give only three cards and one is associated with the person one's the place and one is the object but they don't know which and the explanations that i've seen detectives come up with playing the end game for ukrainian is fascinating and really like mentally delicious i've watched people just love that part because oh well this is this and this but then wait if you actually turn this around then this could be this and that it's great and i worry about people who don't even know that there's ukrainian version playing the polish version and having this very lackluster end game that i don't think it'll spoil the game for them but they won't know about this great other option so i know there's going to be an english printing i hope that it's all cleared up and i hope they stick with the much more interesting end game now let's talk about replayability this game comes with 84 dream cards 19 people 19 location and 20 uh object cards so that seems like uh i don't know how to do the math but it seems like when you did the math for figuring out the different combinations it's gonna be like millions and millions of options so you'd think oh man this game has infinite replayability and i don't think that's necessarily the case but i think it's got good legs on it uh i would not say the replayability is super high because we have already noticed in the five games that i played so far a couple times where people kind of like oh it's hard to describe but sometimes it feels like oh more dream cards with water on them or oh wow every single one of these locations is a room inside a house now i get that thematically you're in this haunted house and that's where the murder happens and i get it and some of the locations are like a beach or like underground but it really feels like many of them are very similar it's like oh this is the old brown room with a bear rug and this is the old brown room with a chess set and a bookcase and this is the one with the bookcase and a knight and armor it the differentiation between some of the rooms is not so great but you know thematically i think or design-wise they were somewhat locked in i i've also found that you know once you go through the dream cards a couple times especially as the ghost player you can kind of be like oh here's the one with the spider on top of the chandelier again 84 seems like a really big number until you played a couple times and then you're like oh i i kind of familiar with all the cards now and you lose a little bit of that um oh amazing as you draw the cards for the first time but that's really not a knock on this game i've played it five times i can easily see myself playing this like 15 more times and not feeling like it's going to be old but i feel like i'm already starting to get a little bit of a scratch in my head where i'm like it's it's lost a little bit of that amazing discovery the first time you play the game but once you get past that you can just ratchet up the difficulty and instead of it being all about this wondrous new mechanic you don't know well it's now a mechanic that you really get and you can delve into the difficulties of it so i'm not concerned about the replayability but i don't think it's necessarily astronomical and now let's talk player count mysterion plays two to seven players i've only personally played the four five and six player game but i have some opinions about the other uh counts as well i personally think that this game plays best with four detectives and one ghost so a five player game but that also means that i think that when you have more people playing the game so if you have six people or seven people i think you should keep the same amount of detectives i think you should keep it at four detectives and then just have one or two people just spectate but actively spectate because you can stand there or sit there and try and come up with theories along with everybody else even if you don't personally have a detective in front of you now the six player game i played it played well i would do that again if everybody wants to have their own detective but i really feel like if you have seven people i'm just gonna say listen somebody has to participate while not having their own detective because the ghost player has such a huge burden they have to give a dream to every single person so if they're giving six dreams a turn every single turn the game's just gonna go long and that poor ghost player's brains just gonna explode out of their heads because it's just it's kind of stressful and that's just really adds on to the stress without adding fun and the two to three player game i imagine they play well but again i think the strength is in that discussion of detectives and you're not really going to have that at all with a two-player game because just one-on-one even though that uh one detective one player plays two detectives uh and then the three-player game there's two people with detectives i'm sure they're fine but i really like the four detectives one ghost setup for this game in conclusion it's probably no surprise that i love this game for all the reasons i've stated before but also in particular that it's just a great group experience you know like i said it's a meaty party game it's just great being able to try to figure this stuff out together and know that even the ghost player wants you to figure it out it's a very positive experience and i play it with people who don't really like um aggression or like attacking other people and they love this kind of setting and i've also played this with people who just love puzzles and logic and that is just oozing out of this game because just the the ghost player is building puzzles and the detectives are trying to solve them essentially and it just works really well as i said i played it with my family who's not into complicated games in the slightest and they were just really energetic and jazzed about it we ended up winning that game and they were so excited i'm looking forward to playing it with them again and i'm just i continue to look forward to playing this with everybody pretty much it's seeing a lot of play in my gaming group and i don't think that's gonna slow down uh obviously we put a bunch of time into building ghost player screens to enhance the experience of the game and that just shows you how excited we all are for it so i strongly suggest you check this game out i know the american or the english version won't be ready until i believe august of 2015 but the polish version is out right now and as you probably saw on the rule set it is completely language independent so you just throw out the rule book print out an english version and you've got this amazing game with a kooky name on the front of the cover and i really don't think you're gonna go wrong with it i hope you've enjoyed this video if you'd like to see more like it please subscribe to my youtube channel and thanks for watching