Mysterium: The Haunted House

There aren’t enough cooperative asymmetric boardgames, especially not ones that feature a silent ghost trying to give players clues by means of cards with completely abstract art on them.

If you have ever said that to your self then Mysterium is the game for you… Before I start lets talk about the elephant in the room, you may have noticed that the title of the box in the image above doesn’t say Mysterium, it says Tajemnicze Domostwo, which is apparently Polish for “Haunted House”, the reason for this is that Mysterium doesn’t have an English edition, yet…

There is an English Edition on the way, and it will have some improvements / slightly different game mechanics, but as far as I’m aware it doesn’t have a concrete release date as yet. The thing is, that doesn’t really matter. Mysterium has not text in it, apart from the rules which you can get a translated version of over at Board Game Geek.

The story of Mysterium is that there is this house on the outskirts of Paris, and 100 years ago someone was murdered there. The wrong person was put on trial and executed for the murder and they have haunted the house ever since. In an effort to appease the spirit the owners have called upon the worlds foremost paranormal investigators to spend a week in the house to try and figure out who the real murderer was and put the spirit to rest.

Mysterium plays like the bastard child of Cluedo (Clue) and Dixit, but it’s better than both put together… One player plays the ghost, the other players play the paranormal investigators. Over the course of 7 rounds the players have to figure the circumstances under which the murder took place and who the real murderer was.

This is done by way of visions that the ghost player gives each player, the visions are large art cards, which are very reminiscent of the cards from Dixit, each player is assigned three cards in secret:

  • An item: representing “What”
  • A location, representing “Where”
  • A person representing “Who”

The players have to first figure out the what their assigned person was doing, then where they were doing it, and finally who they actually were (I think the new English version changes this order) based on the vision they were given by the ghost. Discussion is allowed among the investigators who can assist in interpreting the vision, but at the end of the round each player has to chose what they think the ghost was referring to with the vision by putting their token on it.

Once all the tokens are placed the ghost is allowed to affirm or reject the investigators guess. If an investigator guesses the correct item they then have to guess the location in the next round and then the person when they have guessed that.

The interesting thing about Mysterium, are first that the Ghost isn’t allowed to communicate with the investigators in any shape of form apart from giving them their vision for the turn and telling them that they guessed correctly or incorrectly at the end of the turn, this leads to a lot of frustration and hilarity on the Ghost’s side because the vision cards are so vague that most of them could literally mean anything. Trying to keep a straight face and not yell at the investigators for being idiots when one immediately guesses the correct card but is then talked out of it by the other players if really difficult

The vision cards are beautifully  illustrated, with tons of elements that you can use to try and hint to the players, the thing is not everyone see’s the same thing when they look at the cards, in fact it frequently occurs that a player will point something out on a card that you never noticed, for example one of the items is a clock, it was multiple play throughs in with 3 three different groups before a player to said they thought that the vision was eluding to the clock because there was a mermaid on the clock, none of us had seen the mermaid up to that point…

Being the ghost is really fun because you essentially know what is going on, and you have to think laterally to try and pick visions that will guide the players to pick the right cards, however, given how bonkers some of the cards are you will get a lot of abuse from the players for picking cards that in their eyes have nothing to do with what they are trying to guess, or worse cards that are blatantly telling them to pick the wrong one, the thing is you can’t defend yourself until the game is over, you just have to adjust your card choices the next turn to line up with the different players’ way of thinking.

With one group we played a game where I was the ghost for the first game, one of the investigators spent the whole game incredulous at my choice of visions, I was “Clearly doing it wrong” because nothing I had played made any sense. That player was the ghost in the second game and they saw quite how difficult it is to guide a bunch of players with only a limited number of really abstract cards.

I genuinely love this game, it looks nice it plays well and it gets your brain going. It also works well for anywhere from 2 to 6 players.

The English version should be out later this year, it changes the setting to a Scottish castle, adds a screen for the ghost to keep his cards in order and hidden, and changes some of the art. To be honest it is probably worth waiting for the English version just for the screen, but the game plays really well as is and you don’t need to speak a word of Polish to play the Polish version.

Hive: Nothing Buggy About This Game


There are some games like Chess, Draughts (Checkers), or Go that are incredibly simple and so easy to teach, but can take ages to master. These games usually have a set of really simple rules and a win condition, that is easily understood. Hive is one of those games.

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Hive is hexagonal chess with bugs, in the base game each player has 11 pieces which represent 5 different bug types, each of these bugs can move in a different way:

  • 1 Queen Bee: Can move exaclty once space.
  • 2 Spiders: Can move exactly 3 spaces.
  • 3 Soldier Ants: Can move around the outside of the hive as many squares as required.
  • 3 Grasshoppers: Can hop over the hive in any straight line
  • 2 Beetles: Can mount the hive and move exactly once space.

There are expansions that add a Mosquito, a Ladybird and a Pill-bug, the first two are included in the Pocket and Carbon edition out of the box.

Players take turns either placing a piece or moving a piece, with the ultimate goal of surrounding their opponent’s Queen Bee.

The only real rules are that you have to place your Queen within your first three turns, you can’t move any placed pieces until you have placed your queen, and you cannot break the hive.

That’s it! It’s that simple!

Of course within that is a world of strategy, do you place the queen early or late? Do you go on the full offensive and hope that you can capture your opponent’s queen before your opponent? or do you play defensively moving your queen out of the way? Can you trap your opponents crucial pieces to prevent them from using them?

The beauty of this game is the simplicity and variety of bugs, which allows for and astounding amount of variance in game-play styles. Although when playing with just one opponent I’ve found that the game can fall into a stagnant rhythm of playing the same moves or trying variations on the same strategy, which can get very frustrating, it’s astounding when playing with a new player how you get those “I never thought of doing that!” moments. Sometimes you just have to think outside the box.

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Hive probably isn’t as deep as Chess for example, but it’s a lot less intimidating, and for a new player it has the advantage that there aren’t books upon books written on how to play this game effectively, I’m sure there are winning strategies and patterns to be discovered but I think that the permutation space for hive might actually be large enough that it’ll take a while for them to be figured out.

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Putting all that aside, hive is a joy to look at, the pieces are gorgeous. Whether you are playing the original game, the pocket edition, or the new “Carbon” edition, the hexagonal pieces are stunning, and feel really nice in your hand, like Dominoes or nice Mah Jong tiles.

Hive is also a great travel game for two people, it takes up very little space, and comes with a carry case/bag to keep all the tiles in (At least Carbon and Pocket do) and you can play it on any flat surface.

Hive is also available on iOS (£1.49) and Android (Free).

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Tanto Cuoro: Do-maid-ion First impressions

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There are two types of board gamers, those for who the theme of a game is important and those for whom the theme of a game doesn’t matter a toss as long as the game has solid mechanics. (OK so putting everyone who participates in a hobby on a binary like that is ridiculous but I’m not exactly about to formulate an ontology of board gamers based on mechanics Vs. theme I’m just writing the opening paragraph to a shitty review, calm down…)

I bought Tanto Cuoro as a gift for a friend, partly because I’d read that it wasn’t terrible, and partly because she is obsessed with some really weird Japanese niche cultures. I wasn’t expecting the game to be that good, I didn’t even expect to play the game at all to be honest. But then I did…

Gameplay

At it’s heart Tanto Cuoro (Which is Italian for “A lot of heart” apparently) is a deck building game not dissimilar to Dominion, your goal is to assemble the a collection of maids to serve you and become the ultimate master of the house.

Each turn you get a hand of cards from you deck which contains a set of maids and or some “Love” cards which are the games currency, (Yes maids are paid in love not money, I’ll let you think of that what you will) and initially you are allowed to be “Served” by one maid per turn.

Being served by a maid means you play that maid and gain the benefits that maid provides usually this is one of:

  • Extra Love: Giving you more currency to buy maids.
  • Card Draw: Allowing you to draw more cards in the hope of getting more love to spend.
  • Extra Servings: Allowing you to play more maids
  • Extra Employment: Allowing you to hire more maids to your household.

Love is spent in the Town where you can either employ maids or purchase events, the maids you buy are added to your discard pile and are shuffled into your deck when it runs out, you can also buy private maids which don’t go into your deck but give you an ongoing effect which is usually helpful.

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Events are basically a way to screw the other player over by making their maids ill which negates their bonuses, or giving them bad habits which loses you victory points.

You can also promote maids to “chamber maids”, which takes them out of your deck permanently and may give you bonuses at the end of the game.

Once two of the piles of maids is depleted the game is over and each player tallies up the the maids in their house hold and whomever has the most victory points wins.

Opinion

I wasn’t expecting to like this game, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think it would be a terrible game… I just didn’t think it would be for me. I actually really enjoyed playing it though. Behind the cute anime maids in skimpy maid outfits, are some pretty solid mechanics, the art is also very well done if you are into the theme then that is a bonus, but building a household of maids and then trying to figure out how to chain them to get the most victory points is actually quite fun.

I’ve not played Dominion in 5 years, so the rules for that are a little rusty in my head, but I think this might oddly have a little more depth than the games of Dominion I played, which I found surprising.

If you like deck building games and either the theme appeals to you, or you are willing to ignore it then this game is well worth a look. Also if you don’t want to invest in the physical game there is a version available for iOS and while it’s not free it’s pretty cheap (£2.49 last time I checked) it also benefits from having a tutorial built in to it and varying levels of AI.

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My crowning achievement was chaining a set of maids to add love and servings to my pool such that I managed to accrue 18 love allowing me to employ two copies of “Marianne Soleil” who is worth 6 victory points.

 

Game Review: Cards Against Humanity

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I don’t think I’ve laughed as much as I did while playing “Cards Against Humanity” in a very long time, I laughed so hard I gave myself the hiccups.

Cards Against Humanity is a fairly simple game, each player is dealt a hand of 10 “White” cards with a random phrases on them like (The expansions give you blank cards to fill in with your own in jokes):

  • “Being a Dinosaur”
  • “Goblins”
  • “Stephen Hawking talking dirty”

Players then take turns drawing a “Black” card which has a phrase with one or more blanks in it such as:

  • But before I kill you Mr. Bond I must show you ___________________
  • In M. Night Shyamalaman’s new movie, Bruce Willis discovers that _______________ had really been ______________ all along.
  • Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s_________________

The other players have to play in one or more white cards which are shuffled and then read out. There is a mild element of strategy to this, because the player who played the black card picks the winner, you have to pick not the funniest card but the one that you think will appeal the most to that player’s sense of humour.

Whoever’s card is picked wins that round, everyone draws a replacement card and the next player draws a black card for everyone else to play.

That’s it… There are house rules, some of which are genius, but that is pretty much the game in it’s entirety. It’s a really good way to get to know people and some of the bizarre/sick combinations that people come up with are hilarious.

I liked this game so much that having played it I ordered it off Amazon the next day, I can’t wait to play it again…

  

Game Idea: Scrabble Dungeon

I’m not entirely sure where this idea came from, but bear with me…

Imaging a dungeon exploration game where you have to build the dungeon you are playing in by playing Scrabble (Or some other non trademarked version of the aforementioned word game).

Game Mechanics:

Each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is designated a type of room, for example:

  • A. Easy monster room
  • B. Fire room.
  • C. Block Puzzle.
  • D. Boss fight.
  • Z. Treasure Room

A player is given 7 Letters to start with with which they must place a word down, this does two things:

  1. Creates the dungeon.
  2. Gives the player an amount of Experience points equal to the value of the word that they just played.

The player then has the option to play another word with their remaining letters, or enter the dungeon. Note that they don’t gain any new letters after playing a word.

In the dungeon the player has to overcome various obstacles, solve puzzles, fight monsters, perform acts of derring-do or whatever, they will gain items to help them along the way as the fight through the dungeon. As each room is completed the player will also be awarded a letter,  which they can use to place words on the board and expand the dungeon.

Each dungeon room will yield one letter, meaning that the player shouldn’t have more than 7 letters in their hand at any point, emulating scrabble, and forcing the player to play more letters and fight through the dungeon to play through the game.

Characters level up by gaining experience, whether or not they gain experience by killing stuff or just by playing letters is another matter, I’m not sure if it’s fair to only award experience points for placing letters as the letters you’d get would be random? I suppose it adds an element of chance to the game.

Getting the experience points for a room by placing it as part of a word before you play through it’s dungeon adds an interesting mechanic to the dungeon explorer genre.

Double/triple word and letter spaces would also probably have some effect on all the rooms that are associated with that placement, and there might be others that only had an effect on the dungeon rooms but not the word score.

I’m not sure what the win condition is, perhaps you just keep playing till you can’t put down any more words or till your character dies? Or like in Scrabble you play until you exhaust all the letters in the “Bag”?

Alternatively the game could be a two player game, in which the players battle it out between themselves. This would mean that a character could place a small word down and then complete a few sections of the dungeon while the other player is thinking of a word to prevent them from getting any more letters, you’d probably have to remove the limit on 7 letters per player, maybe have a limit of 10 letters to keep it fair?

Another possible game mechanic is that players can’t actually put down words that use tiles/letters for which they have not yet completed the dungeon room for. This forces the players to actually play the dungeon game, and puts a twist on the “You stole the place for my word” gripe that Scrabble players often moan to each other about it. “I didn’t steal it I fought for it”.

If the game is a two player game, then maybe players would gain some points for placing a word but would be able to get the same number of points again by being the first to complete the room associated with a tile?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Home Made Wooden Settlers of Catan

Full BoardOn the subject of home made board games here is another one, this time it’s Settlers of Catan again from Reddit, user amaurer3210 made this with his fiancée for a friends wedding.

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I machined each tile from 3/8″ ply. Each one has six magnets set into the sides so that they snap together nicely.

My fiancee did the artwork while we then silkscreened onto each tile after staining.

We all play on it nearly every weekend.

The magnets are a great idea!

Arguably it’s not as professional as the one by Boardcrafting that I posted here a couple of years ago but it’s still very nice.

Arkham Horror (Board Game) First Impressions

I’m going to begin by confessing that despite calling myself a fan of his work I’ve read very little Lovecraft, I’m in the process of rectifying this at the moment, but to be honest I don’t think that reading the entire back catalogue of an author should be a prerequisite to play a board game. I’m glad to say then when is comes to Arkham Horror by Fantasy Flight Games no knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft‘s mythos is required.

The game is set in the city of Arkham, and all the players need to know is that some weird stuff has been happening and that they need to stop an ancient horror from coming into this world. Sure you can rationalize this better if you’ve read some Lovecraft, or played the Call of Cthulhu RPG but the nice thing is that the premise is so familiar to us from other forms of pop culture that players who haven’t even heard of Cthulhu can quite happily play the game.

Rules:

To say that Arkham Horror is a gateway drug pen and paper roleplaying is an understatement, each player is handed a character at random (you can pick if you want to but it’s more fun if you randomize it) the characters have a 6 paired attributes, speed and sneak, will and fight, and lore and luck. You also have a number of stamina and sanity points which represent how healthy or sane your character is and a number of item cards.

The linked attributes take the form of a sliding scale which you can change on a turn by turn basis by an amount equal to your “Focus” statistic, this allows you to adapt your character to developments in the game, however some characters are just better at some things than others.

The characters have a nice blurb on the back of the card which tells you why they are in Arkham and how they noticed that something wasn’t quite right about the city as well as a drawing that shows you what the character looks like, each character also has a unique ability which reflects their occupation. The blurb and the picture really help you associate with the character, and if you are that way inclined can help you get into character.

As play progresses you move about the city fighting monsters, trying to close gates to other dimensions and gathering equipment to help you along the way. There are several win conditions which mean that you have managed to make the city safe for the time being, but the fun begins if you don’t manage to win the game before one of the lose conditions happens.

The reason you are trying to fight the endless tide of monsters is that if too many monsters enter play, too many gates to the other world open or you’ve been playing for too long the “Ancient One” is summoned and you have to collectively fight it to save yourselves and the human race.

These fights can range from the relatively easy (We found Nyarlothoptep to be quite easy for example but we did have one blessed character with a shotgun) to the “Everybody just dies” (If you Azathoth awakens then it’s just game over).

Play progresses in 4 phases:

Upkeep:

Where you reset any spells you’ve cast or items you’ve used, gain money from retainers or preform other actions like healing if you have the doctor or psychiatrist character.

Movement:

Where you move about the city to different locations, try to sneak past monsters or fight them.

Encounters:

Depending on where you are on the board you can either draw a card that gives you a random encounter for that location, or for some locations you can perform certain actions like buying stuff from the various shops, healing at the hospital, regaining sanity at the asylum or if there is a gate open on the location you are on sucked into another world and have to spend the next couple of turns progressing through it dealing with other worldly encounters before you eventually make your way out and are given the opportunity to close and or seal the gate.

Mythos:

The Mythos Phase will be familiar to anyone who has played The Battlestar Galactica or Game of Thrones Board Games, it’s the random bad stuff happens at the end of the turn phase. You draw a Mythos card which opens a specifies where a gateway to another world opens up and will usually have some rule that affects gameplay on the board, these can be one off events, or persistent changes to gameplay, and help to spice things up. When a gate is opened one or two monsters spill out depending on how many players you have. The Mythos card will also have set of symbols on either a black or white background, these symbols tell you which, if any, monsters move that turn and which direction they move in.

Components:

On a whole this game is very pretty, there are a bucket load of tokens and the like fro keeping track of your health, sanity, money, clues, etc. There is also an ungodly number of cards for the various encounters, and Mythos events, as well as the possessions which come in a number of types:

  1. Common Items: Such as guns, knives, whisky most of these are weapons but I’ve seen vehicles that can help you move about the board.
  2. Unique Items: These are ancient artefacts and can be magical weapons, ancient tomes, or magical relics among other things.
  3. Skills: These give you some enhancement to your character boosting one of their skills or allowing you to re-roll certain checks for example.
  4. Spells: I have to say I’ve not played a character that used spells in anger as you need a high lore skill to use them, but spells seem to be one off effects that aid you in combat, improve your dice rolls or help you in some other way, they require a check to activate and cost an amount of sanity to pull off.
  5. Allies: These are a bunch of people/animals that will help you along the way, they grant bonuses to rolls and or other benefits, they also all have a one time ability which you can invoke if you sacrifice them. I assume that this is supposed to be them sacrificing themselves to save you, but the I find the image of sacrificing the dog “Duke” to regain all your sanity quite disturbing.
  6. Blessings/Curses: Make it easier or harder to pass dice rolls.
  7. Retainers: Give you a steady flow of cash every turn.
  8. Deputy Cards: If you become a deputy of Arkham you get a service revolver, a police car and a pay check.

All the cards have nice illustrations and seem to be made from the same card stock as Fantasy Flight’s other board games.

The board is nice and big but it’s got a weird 6 fold design and doesn’t seem to rest flat, mine actually split across one of the seams and is now in two pieces which is a little irritating as I’m really careful with my board games.

One thing you need when playing this game is a lot of space, my coffee table is by no means small but it barely manages to accommodate this game, which is annoying because I quite fancy getting the expansion box sets but I don’t think I have anywhere to put them.

Opinion:

The game is fun to play, it’s billed as a cooperative game and to be honest that is where it kind of falls a little flat, while you can swap items between players (If they are in the same location) you can’t team up against really difficult monsters which is a shame, and it often feels like you are wondering about the board completely independently. Sure the players work together closing gates and it’s possible that one player can clear the path for another player to get to an area that is blocked by big monsters, but it still doesn’t feel very cooperative.

I’m not sure what game mechanics would help make the game more cooperative aside from allowing players to assist each other in actions and maybe having special events that only happened if there were a certain number of players in a location.

The skill check and combat mechanics are fairly straightforward, you, although it can seem that if you have certain characters that there is no point in going into combat because you will just lose or go insane. This can be mitigated by getting skills, spells and items which I assume is the intention, but getting any of these usually requires money, which is a scarce resource in the game. In one game I ended up spending 3 consecutive turns at the newspaper trying to get a retainer to make enough money to buy items meanwhile the number of gates and monsters on the board kept creeping upwards and eventually one of the stores shut before I could get to it with my money (As the “Terror Track” goes up different shop close and more and more allies leave town).

The game also suffers from there being a very thin margin between everything being okay and all hell breaking loose. We’ve played 2 games in which the great old one should have been summoned but we didn’t notice because everything was hunky dory 2 turns ago. A track or dial to keep track of the number of monsters/gates on the board would have been useful as it can be hard to tell at a glance. I’ve seen such tracks made by players but it really is an oversight for them to not be part of the game.

One of the really nice things about this game is that it doesn’t require you to be a hard core Lovecraft fan to really enjoy it, this is an issue I’ve found with players playing Battlestar Galactica for example where a lot of things only make sense in the context of the TV series, and some cards have pseudo spoilers on them, thankfully Arkham Horror is more “Down to Earth” and it’s easier to relate to.

If you are looking for a board game to kill 3-5 hours I highly recommend this game.

Syfy making BSG prequel “Blood and Chrome”

Io9 seem to think this is a bad thing for Caprica, SyFy are making another prequel to BSG. To be honest it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, Caprica was rubbish, okay maybe not rubbish but it was drawn out and didn’t really flow very well and most importantly it missed out on everything that BSG had going for it. I only watched the first season, and by the end of it you just felt like they had lost the plot.

I think that a BSG prequel that focused on the First Cylon war which this one seems to would be more in the spirit of BSG and all in all just less shit. As I understand it this show will Focus on Will Adama as a viper pilot, which I think will awesome.

In other BSG news, Fantasy Flight Games are releasing a new expansion for the BSG board game, and it also looks like it’s going to be awesome. If you’ve not played the BSG board game and you like board games and or BSG in any way shape or form you should go out and buy it now.

Via io9