Mycelia - Kickstarter Tutorial

hi everyone my name is Monique and today I'm going to be showing you how to play a game that is currently on Kickstarter called Mycelia Mycelia is a game all about the life cycle of fungus in this game one to four players are going to be competing to grow spores grow mushrooms and then eventually Decay them earning points every time they grow a new mushroom this game is both designed and illustrated by JJ Neville and it's published by splitstone games who are helping sponsor this video now before we begin I do need to mention that everything that you see here is considered a prototype copy of the game which means the quality of the components are going to improve by the final product and again this game is currently on Kickstarter so if you'd like to learn more information I've included a link to their campaign in the description below last but not least if you enjoy videos like this and would like to see more in the future please consider subscribing alright without further Ado let's begin so if you please direct your attention to the center of the table we are all set up here for a two-player game of Mycelia welcome to the world of fungus and mushrooms now just to kind of give you the lay of the land in the middle here we have the starting star-shaped board that is comprised of several triangles in one of five colors the different colors represent different environments and nutrients that will be needed in order to grow these mushrooms now each player starts the game with one mother mushroom already on one of these Central triangles on the board as well as five player mats which are going to be used to keep track of your mushrooms how many times they Spore and when they eventually Decay players also start with one insect token each as well as a hand of three mushroom cards now speaking of mushroom cards the deck is comprised of all sorts of different types of mushrooms that can be found in the real world for example in my hand I have the drumstick truffle Club the metal puffball as well as the magpie fungus and so in order to grow these mushrooms you'll need to discard certain types of spores that are listed at the bottom left hand corner of the card so for example if I wanted to grow The Magpie fungus I would have to discard either a red or an orange Spore and there's also symbols that pertain to each color if needed now one of the main ways that players score points is by growing mushrooms and the number of points you score is at the top right hand corner of the card these points are going to range quite a bit so for example my Drumstick truffle Club will score me six points when grown but it also requires me to spend four types of spores whereas my Magpie fungus only scores me two points but also only requires me to spend one Spore in addition the number at the bottom right hand corner of the card tells you how many spores this mushroom will be able to produce once it's grown and of course eventually players will have to Decay some of their mushrooms and so each card has a power at the very bottom of the card that comes into effect as soon as that mushroom decays in this example as soon as I Decay my Magpie fungus I will immediately remove all spores from one triangle so that can be quite a tactical move now the way that the game works is players are going to be taking turns taking two actions each there are six different types of actions to choose from but on your turn you must take two different types of actions now one of the main actions that you're going to be taking during the game is called Spore this action allows you to place out to more of your own spores onto the board in order to prepare for growing these mushrooms now over the course of the game you'll have more mushrooms to choose from but at the start of the game each player only has one option which is their mother mushroom that only produces two spores at a time the first Spore produced will always go on the tile that the chosen mushroom is on which would be that one for me now spores are always going to go in the direction of the wind so in order for me to determine where my second Spore goes I have to roll the wind die so I'm gonna go ahead and roll it now all right so if you look closely at each triangle tile each long Edge is associated with a specific symbol spores when spreading across the board are always going to spread in a triangular formation with the origin tile at the very top so since I rolled this symbol this symbol pertains to this long Edge down here which means my second Spore is going to cross this long Edge onto this tile had my mushroom been able to produce more than two spores then they would continue spreading to either the left or the right triangle in this large triangular formation always spreading across the long Edge so now that we have some spores on the board let's move on to the next type of action which is probably the most important one it's called fruit the fruit action lets you grow a new mushroom so like I was showing earlier in my hand I have the magpie fungus card that requires me to spend either a red Spore or an orange one here I have a red Spore as well as a brown Spore now whenever you fruit a mushroom card from your hand there are two concepts that are really really important the first thing is all of the spores that you spend must be connected in a single mycelial Network for me it's not really going to be much of a problem considering my Magpie fungus only requires me to spend one Spore however the other thing is all of the spores that you spend must be in your domain and so just as an example if in future turns I was able to produce spores that spread across like this because this Spore is on a triangle that has my opponent's mother Mushroom on it this war now belongs to them which means this player can discard my Spore in order to build their mushroom if they wanted to it also unfortunately breaks up my mycelial network and so for example if in the future turn I was able to Spore this token on this triangle I wouldn't actually be able to spend this in conjunction with any of my other spores because this triangle breaks up my network now going back to our previous example I'm going to go ahead and fruit The Magpie fungus so I'll just go ahead and discard that Spore that's on the red triangle and then I'm going to choose one of the five mats that I have in front of me to place my card on and it doesn't really matter which mat you choose since these are all just placeholders for the mushroom card the token that's on the mat now gets placed onto the tile where you discarded your Spore which would be right here now you're not allowed to grow more than one Mushroom on the same tile but you can grow a mushroom where you have your mother mushroom from now on if I were to choose to take the Spore action I'll now have the option to choose between my mother mushroom or my Magpie fungus which produces three spores the difference is that each mushroom you grow can only Spore up to two times and so each time I take this four action using that mushroom I actually have to move my token up one space and as soon as I've spored twice I can no longer take that action using that specific mushroom mother mushrooms on the other hand can Spore indefinitely which means I may want to consider moving it elsewhere which is the next type of action called move the move action is very simple it allows you to move your mother mushroom up to two spaces but whenever moving you must always move along a flat Edge never along the pointy edge of the triangle now it's important to keep in mind that you can never enter a triangle that has your opponent's mother Mushroom in it which makes the move action actually quite important because you can use it to block out other players from reaching other triangles or so you yourself can gain access to other triangles that you need to access in order to grow your mushrooms and by the way there are six gray triangles in the entire stack and these are special because any spores grown on this triangle is considered a wild color now let's just say we've played a couple of turns I've spored twice using my Magpie fungus and now it is ready to decay in order for you to actually retire your mushroom giving you access to the power that's listed below you have to take the next type of action which is called Decay when taking this action you're essentially going to take the mushroom card and flip it over so that the Decay power is visible there are three main types of powers and they tell you when the power activates in this example I have one that activates immediately it's says remove all spores from one triangle so I may want to remove all the spores from this triangle because as it stands right now the red player currently owns domain over all the spores including one of mine so I'll just go ahead and remove these spores of course my spores go back to me and there's go back to them and the mushroom car just gets tucked behind the mat that it was on there is no limit to the number of decayed cards that can exist behind each player map but each player can only have at most five active mushrooms on the board one for each mat and of course you finish the action by returning the mushroom token and resetting the Spore counter now the other types of Decay action types that you'll see are ones such as this one which provide you an immediate upgrade that is basically in effect for the rest of the game this one specifically says if you pick up a card from the deck pick two and discard one so that'll help you find maybe the the ideal mushroom type that you'd like and the other benefit type are the ones that allow you to up upgrade future mushrooms that are played on the same mat for example with these Scarlet elf cup it says you place the wind die on the preferred Direction but only specifically for new mushrooms that are grown on that player mat slot now the last two types of actions are very straightforward we have the Discover action which allows you to gain a new card into your hand either from the face up display or from the top of the draw deck and finally we have the explore action that allows you to grow out the main board giving you access to more types of environments that you didn't otherwise have access to taking this action allows you to take the topmost triangle from either one of these stacks and place it along the perimeter of the board connected by the long side just like that and so as you can see the board is going to grow in unpredictable ways making each game a bit different now anytime you place out a triangle tile with an insect symbol on it you also place an insect token on the tile players can pick up insect tokens by moving directly to the tile itself elf and each player also starts the game with one now insect tokens can be used in one of two ways on your turn you can spend as many insect tokens as you like and it doesn't count as an action spending one insect token allows you to refresh the market you essentially just discard the three face up cards and replace them with new ones from the deck spending two insect tokens allow you to move another player's mother mushroom anywhere on the board as long as the tile doesn't already contain a mother mushroom so spending these insect tokens can be a really powerful tactical decision and at the end of the game for any of these that you don't spend you'll score one point for every two leftover and that's essentially it those are all the six different types of actions that you'll be able to take during the game as soon as one player has decayed a mushroom in all five of their slots that triggers the end of the game and that player gets this token which will score them five extra points at that point the game ends immediately and all players score all of their grown mushrooms including the ones that have been decayed as well as the ones that are still on their player mats and of course you score one point for every two insect tokens left over and at that point Whoever has the most points wins and that's essentially how you play Mycelia now if you have any questions about anything that you saw here today please feel free to leave me a comment down below and I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible now this game is currently on Kickstarter so if you'd like to learn more about their campaign I've also included a link in the description below thank you all so much for watching the video today I really hope it was helpful if you enjoy content like this and would like to see more in the future please consider subscribing thank you bye [Music] foreign [Music]