Ghost Hunting by Lantern-light

We have a camping tradition.  Every trip we try to find a game to play after dark by the light of a couple camping lanterns.  Some games work really well for this.  Betrayal at the House on the Hill makes for an excellent, spooky hour of woodsy gaming.  Typically anything in the horror genre works in the near total blackness of a camp in the woods.  Of course it helps when you have a quality game that has the right theme.  This is the case with Mysterium.

Mysterium, from Asmodee, surprised me.  I had heard good things about it, but had never really had the chance to get a detailed review.  So when it got laid out between our lamps I was excited to see what people saw that made them tell me it was good.  It is a little hard to put into words to be honest.  IT holds the usual hallmarks of a good game.  It's easy to learn, plays pretty quickly, and leaves you wanting another play through.  This really made me want another play through.  I think we played six games.  Usually a good game gets two or three before we decide to leave the table for the lazy warmth of our campfire.  Mysterium found me scrambling to revive the fire two or three times because I was so engrossed.

The best analogy I have been able to come up with is that Mysterium is a marriage of Clue and Dixit.  IF you haven't played one or both that won't make much sense.  One player is a ghost who was murdered.  The other players are psychics who have been contacted by the ghost to help solve their murder.  The ghost can only communicate through abstract images and faint knocks.  Our ghost only has access to a limited number of images.  The psychics have to try to interpret the images given to them to identify a person, room, and weapon.  Once all the psychics have their set of clues identified everyone votes on who they think the culprit was based on another series of visual clues from the ghost.

Player pawns.  These look even better in person.

Our spooky setup

The game is tremendously mentally engaging.  As a psychic you must compare an image to a field of people in the first round, rooms in the second, and finally what weapon was used.  Psychics can converse among each other and assist each other in interpreting their image.  You get seven turns to discern everyone's three clues.   The game is pretty co-operative and I had a couple instances where I was either thinking the wrong thing and others helped steered me right.  I had just as many times where everyone thought I should guess one one and I took a gut-feeling flier and was right.  It's a neat feeling to get it right regardless how you get to your decision.  There's a little click in your brain and you feel confident and smart.

I played one game as the ghost.  Being the ghost is very difficult; far more difficult than being a psychic.  You get seven cards to use for your clues.  They are frustratingly abstract most of the time.  But it's what I always call a good kind of frustration.  It makes you want to do it again because it feels like next time you will do better.  Like so many video games I played as a kid it made me feel like I knew I was good enough to do this rather than I'm not good enough so I'll quit.

We played six games over the weekend.  We won zero of them.  But again, we felt like we were good enough to get one right and wanted to play more.  That, to me, is the mark of a great game.  I'm ready for my next game.