Forum Overview :: Overboard! :: Mysterium Park

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]The one dud in my collection. I had such high hopes for this one. This is the smaller and cheaper expansion to the modern cooperative "Clue" replacement, Mysterium. The premise of Mysterium is a group of psychic detectives are visiting a haunted mansion on halloween night and have just seven hours (rounds) to commune with the ghost and identify their murderer, location, and weapon. But ghosts can't communicate in words, so the one ghost player silently passes cards to the detectives with abstract dreamlike scenes on them that indicate which of the suspects in a random array is theirs. It's a big and moderately expensive game with lots of setup time and tons of production value, including a DM screen for the ghost and a 3D clock for the round timer. I imagine it's a big hit at parties. Mysterium Park shifts the setting to a haunted amusement park, removes identifying the murder weapon, carves a lot of fat from the original's rules, and pares it down to six rounds. It doesn't have all the huge decorative elements of the original, the ghost now just reads the answer from a card on a tiny stand, but it also takes almost no time to set up. It's received near-universal praise from fans of the original for it's snappier rules while retaining the core gameplay of the original, and cheaper asking price. Sadly it's a failure, at least as a 2-player game. The biggest weakness of Mysterium Park is its setting. In the original's mansion, a kitchen looks very different from a library looks very different from a greenhouse. But all the locations in Mysterium Park look maddeningly similar. String-lights, carnival booths, night scenes. In one game as the ghost I thought I was so clever giving a clue card with a teddy bear because there was a pile of them on my intended card, but quickly realized my mistake because two other locations had piles of stuffed animals that I didn't notice. We threw up our hands and just made a house rule to leave out locations and cut the game down to 3 rounds of identifying suspects, because at least those cards are clearly differentiated. But there just aren't that many actual suspect cards, you could easily see all of them in 2-3 games, and we quickly learned patterns with each card. If a clue with a balloon comes up, we instantly know it's the clown. Now it <I>is</I> backwards compatible with the cards from original Mysterium and its expansions so we can still play with the snappier rules, but I don't think this game is all that great in 2-player, it's clearly meant as a cooperative party game with all the detectives discussing and interpreting each other's clues, instead of one silent ghost and the other player speaking out loud to themselves to give the ghost a better idea of their thought process. Besides, instead of dumping $75 on expansions that might breathe an extra month or two into Mysterium Park, for a fraction of the price you can get a better-playing cooperative mystery game with...[/quote]