HORROR MONTH #24: Mysterium, by Oleksandr Nevskiy and Oleg Sidorenko (2015)

Type of Media: Board Game

A group of psychics are gathered in an old Scottish manor. They seek contact with the ghost that's been haunting the manor for thirty years, hoping the spirit can give some clue to the identity of his murderer. The psychics receive auspicious dreams. "I dreamed," says the Spiritualist, "of an apple pierced with needles on a pedestal." The Crystal Gazer says "Yeah? Well I dreamed of a barn floating above the ground." "Dude, I got a fat rat playing chess. What the hell does that mean?" says the Tarot Reader, as the ghost pounds his head against the wall because the fat rat is supposed to point you to the cook you IDIOT PICK THE COOK PICK THE COOK.

Welcome to Mysterium, a cooperative board game where everyone plays as a psychic trying to solve a murder, except for one player who plays a ghost trying to guide those psychics by sending them dreams in the form of "vision cards" decorated with surreal art. The ghost tries to get each psychic to pick a certain person, place, and object out of a lineup before the clock strikes 7AM, or else the ghost vanishes with the daylight and the murder remains unsolved.

Each round the ghost gives each player at least one vision card from their hand of seven cards to try and get them to guess their assigned answer. The ghost can't speak except to tell players if they got their answer right or not. The trouble is, the vision cards are rarely directly related to the answers the psychics are supposed to guess. As the ghost you have to try and find subtle connections between the visions and answers, like similar color palettes, themes, or moods, that the psychics can hopefully pick up on.

Take note, the ghost has to give each psychic at least one card per round. So as the ghost you may have one good clue for a psychic, and if they don't guess correctly off that you're forced to keep giving them red herring after red herring that actually mean nothing. As the psychic you're expected to guess 'cellar' from a picture of a fountain, a jester trapped in an hourglass, and a bike wheel on a boardwalk, and every similarity you can find between them and the potential answers seems dubious. So you think the person playing the ghost is just bad at the game, until it's your turn to be the ghost and you have a hand full of loopy drawings of mice and knights and you realize oh no this is actually really hard.

Mysterium is a gorgeous game, and the vision cards' art is fantastic. Each component of the game is beautiful and thematically appropriate, from the broken clock that counts down the game's rounds to the little ravens that sit on the ghost's screen and mark the number of times they can redraw their hand. The game gets even more fun if you ban the ghost from speaking entirely, making them knock on the table to communicate with the psychics. One knock for yes, two for no.

If you're with your family or a handful of friends for Halloween, Mysterium is a great way to spend an evening. It's thematically appropriate for the season, simple enough that almost anyone can wrap their head around it, and a good excuse to pour over moody, whimsical art.