Mysterium Park Review

One of the very first games I bought for my collection when I entered the hobby was Mysterium. A murder/mystery game of deduction? I was hooked! However, there were some aspects that I wasn’t too keen on. So when I saw Mysterium Park on the shelf at my FLGS, I had to check it out. It looked like a smaller-scale version of the same game, and that interested me. Which game is better? I will tell you that only one of them is still in my collection today. To find out which one, you’ll just have to keep reading!

Mysterium Park is a cooperative game of mystery and deduction in which players are attempting to solve the disappearance/murder of the director of the Mysterium Park Funfair. One player will take on the role of the Ghost of the director, who will be providing Visions to the players to guide them to the correct answer. All of the other players will be Psychics, receiving the Visions and trying to deduce their meanings. To setup for a game, place the game board in the center of the table and place the Turn Marker on the starting space. Each Psychic player takes a pawn and Innocent Token in their chosen color. Shuffle the Character Cards and draw 9 cards, placing them at random on the game board. Shuffle the Location cards and keep that deck nearby. The Ghost player will draw 3 random Plot Cards, take 3 Ticket Tokens, and will shuffle the deck of Vision cards. They will draw 7 Vision cards to be their starting hand. The game is now ready to begin. Pictured below is the setup for a 4-player game.

Over the course of several rounds/turns, the Psychics will receive Visions from the Ghost with clues as to which Character/Location they are looking for. To start the first round, the Ghost will draw and secretly look at the first Plot Card. The Plot Card tells the Ghost which Character Card on the board corresponds to each Psychic player. (See the picture below to view the Plot Card) Looking at their hand of Vision cards, the Ghost must select 1 or more Visions to give to one Psychic player. The Ghost then draws back up to 7 Vision cards, and repeats the process for all remaining players. When all Psychics have received their Vision cards for this turn, they can work together to figure out which Character on the board their Vision is leading them to.

When a Psychic thinks they have figured out their Vision, they place their pawn on the Character card they wish to guess. After all Psychics have picked a Character, the Ghost will resolve their guesses. If a Psychic guessed correctly, they retrieve their pawn, discard their Character and Vision cards, and place their Innocent Token on their Character’s space on the board. If a Psychic guessed incorrectly, they retrieve their pawn and keep their Vision cards. If any Psychics were incorrect, move the Turn Marker to the next number, and start again as described above, but the Ghost only provides Visions to the remaining/incorrect Psychics.

Once all Psychics have correctly identified their Character card, if the Turn Marker has not reached the sixth space, the next round begins with Location cards. Any remaining Character cards on the board are set off to the side, and 9 Location cards are dealt randomly to the board. The Ghost draws a new Plot Card, and this round plays out exactly as with the Character cards described above.

Again, once all Psychics have correctly identified their Location card, if the Turn Marker has not yet reached the sixth space, the final round begins. The remaining Location cards are set off to the side in preparation for the final round. The Ghost will shuffle the Character and Location cards kept aside from earlier and will deal them to the board. They will be set in pairs, so one Character card will correspond to one Location. The Ghost draws the final Plot Card and will create one final Vision to present to all Psychics. The Ghost will select 2 Vision cards – one corresponding to the Character and the other to the Location – and will hand them to the Psychics. The Psychics now must work together to decipher the Vision, and decide which Character/Location pair the Vision is leading them to. If the Psychics guess correctly, everyone wins! The Ghost’s spirit is able to finally rest peacefully, knowing that it’s murderer was discovered. If the Psychics guess incorrectly (or if the Turn Marker ever reached the sixth space before the third round), the game is lost.

I know that kind of seems like a lot, but it really is pretty intuitive once you get going. As a Psychic, you are trying to parse out which card your Vision cards are leading you towards. As the Ghost, you are trying to give Vision cards to Psychics with enough clues in them to lead them toward the correct card. In that regard, the gameplay of Mysterium Park is basically the same as OG Mysterium. But Mysterium Park feels much more streamlined for a few reasons. For starters, there are way fewer components, which makes game setup take less time. Mysterium had not only Characters and Locations, but Objects as well, and each player got Clairvoyance Markers and there was a big screen for the Ghost to keep individual cards, and it took up way more table space, and it was just a lot.

Another element I really like about Mysterium Park is the structure of the rounds/turns. The gameplay doesn’t move on to Locations until all Psychics have discovered their Characters. And since this game is cooperative, it allows players who have guessed correctly to really help their fellow Psychics out with their Vision cards. Regular Mysterium was also cooperative, but it didn’t really feel like it too much. Once you guessed your Character, you were immediately able to move on to Location, and then Object. Unless you made a specific effort to help out, you were mainly just focused on figuring out your Vision cards each turn. It felt more like a race to see who could figure out their 3 cards the fastest, even though everyone wins or loses together.

The trickiest part of Mysterium Park, and perhaps my favorite element, is figuring out the Vision cards. The artwork on all of the cards – Vision, Character, and Location – is pretty unique, so any clues you are trying to give or decipher are going to be quite abstract. It’s fun and neat to see how different players interpret different cards, and which elements they are drawn towards and what they think it means. Many times, as the Ghost, I have given a clue to a particular player, knowing that they would see it the same way as me, only to have them latch onto a completely different and irrelevant aspect, thus leading them toward the wrong card! That’s what makes the cooperative aspect so great – all players can help each other figure out their Vision cards. It makes for a fun and engaging game because everyone is working together and nobody is sitting idly by, waiting for their ‘turn’ to play.

I’ll touch on components briefly. Great production quality from Libellud! The board and cardboard tokens are all nice and sturdy. The pawns are colorful, cute, and fun to handle. The cards are also nice and thick, and the artwork is thematic, colorful, and so unique. Since Mysterium Park has fewer components than Mysterium, that means it has a smaller box which fits perfectly on my game shelves. Solid production here, and it makes the game feel immersive.

As you can probably tell from my last few paragraphs, the winner in the Mysterium Park vs. Mysterium debate for me is definitely Mysterium Park. With fewer components and a more steamlined gameplay, it’s just more accessible for my game group. We don’t always have time to do big setups, and the simplified turns made it super easy to learn/play our first time. I’m not hating on OG Mysterium by any means, but Mysterium Park is more my speed, and I’m gonna stick with it. I’ve never played Dixit, but I’ve been told that Mysterium/Mysterium Park are similar to it. So if you’re a fan of Dixit-type games and are looking for a neat deduction game with a spookier theme, definitely give Mysterium Park a try! Purple Phoenix Games gives this one a strong 8 / 12. I think I could get Travis to bump his score up with more plays!