Ars Cardboard: Mysterium’s dreamy world is ghostly good fun
As I tramped the sodden sidewalks of Chicago beside my three-year-old son, holding his plastic pumpkin while he hiked up to door after door for handouts of candy, I had trouble focusing on the costumed Halloween mayhem all around me. Instead, I kept thinking about the group of psychic adventurers who would join me later that evening for our first-ever round of Mysterium, the gorgeous, ghost-driven Ukrainian board game finally out in an English version.
Set in a Scottish castle on Halloween night, 1922, Mysterium is an asymmetrical cooperative game that mixes elements of Clue and Dixit. In it, a ghost—who can "speak" only through dreamlike visions of horror and wonder—provides clues about his murderer to the gathered psychic investigators. The clues are delivered in the form of 84 "vision cards" that depict scenes of dimly glimpsed wolves, terrible scarecrows, an oversized knight chopping at a tower, a man running in terror down endless hallways, or a couple climbing into the mouth of a fish. The astonishing artwork feels like a dream, disquieting and surreal, and a quick flip through the deck was enough to convince me that I had found the perfect title for some Halloween fun with my gaming group.
Mysterium absolutely drips theme. It comes with an enormous cardboard screen that hides the ghost's activities, a cardboard clock to track the progress of the game's single night of play, a crystal ball token for each player, and even a downloadable soundtrack (.zipped MP3 file). Mysterium was not designed as a brain-busting strategy exercise but as a group experience.
And as an experience, it delivers in spades.
![Volunteer]()