Halloween with Asmodee – Mysterium Park

We are back with another great article about games to play this Halloween season! This time around, we are looking at Mysterium Park, which is a slimmed down, quicker version of Mysterium which we looked at last week. You can read about that here.

The overall goal of the game is identical to Mysterium – players work together to find suspects and murder locations cards based on clues provided to them by the Ghost. Whichever player is the ghost cannot speak, but instead will draw a card from their own deck which will show a variety of colours and locations that mirror the 3×3 grid of cards on the board. From their perspective, the Ghost can see which players need to grab which suspects – one of the suspects on the board will be a witness, which is a free chance at a mistake should one of the other players choose that person as their suspect.

Once the board is setup, the Ghost will than grab 7 large clue cards that feature unique artwork, and begin assigning at least one, but up to 7, cards to each of the players, redrawing up to 7 cards after giving each player their clues. The players can then look at the clues they were given, and while conversing with each other, try to determine who their innocent person is. If they cannot figure it out in round 1, they get 5 more rounds to figure it out.

After completing the six rounds, players will remove all the cards associated with their guesses, leaving behind the 3 cards that no tokens are on – these are the suspects for the end of the game.

The process is repeated for finding a murder location. After all players have succesfully found the culprits and locations – and if they don’t, the game is over – we move to the final phase, where these characters are randomly placed on the board. The Ghost then draws another pattern card and uses clues to help players determine which grouping of clues is the culprit and the location, either in row I, II, or III (based on the card drawn by the Ghost). The Ghost will provide players two more clues to help them determine which row to pick. And that is Mysterium.

Unlike Mysterium, Mysterium Park only requires players to find a suspect and a location, and removes the need to determine a murder weapon, once again making this game faster, and arguably easier to play. Still, we found a decent amount of challenge in just making it to the end of the game, as we continue to argue amongst ourselves who’s clues corresponded to which cards.

As the end of the day, though, this is still a fantastic experience and one that you will love playing with friends and family this holiday season!