Mysterium Board Game: I’m Not Playing This Again, Win My Copy

I’m accepting the fact that dozens of incredible titles in my spare room just won’t be played again.

I am culling, beginning with a game that I think is beautiful, well-designed and worthy, but just not for me: Mysterium, the 2015 murder mystery deduction hit.

The pieces and cards are all there. It’s been played only three times. I want it to live with somebody who loves it.

Here’s how this works:

• I’m still seeking donors who want their own copy of my beautiful and dangerous cocktail booklet. Anybody who donates in Dec. 2024 gets the booklet and is in the prize pool.

• At the end of December, one random donor will get my copy of Mysterium. I’ll mail it in Jan. 2025.

• I have to limit the Mysterium prize to donors in the U.S. lower 48, as international postage rates are breathtaking.

That’s it. Donate and get the cocktail booklet. Maybe end up with a beautiful coop deduction game in which a ghost tries — using only lush and oblique image cards — to tell a table full of psychics who was responsible for their death.

Cascadia Solo: I Thought I Was a Thrice-Ascended EcoArchitect, But I Cheated

Moments after publishing this post, I finally spotted the reason why I was able to rack up such an obscene score: I took too many turns. There are 26 animals placed here. So, regarding the text that follows: It’s all erroneous. I forge on humbled, still in pursuit of an Ascended 110+ score.

What do I do with this game now? Frame it? File it away? I’d been chasing the 110+ “Ascended” solo score ranking of Cascadia all summer, notching 100+ games regularly. A 110+ score seemed like it required a subtle extra layer of calculation I just didn’t have.

Then this. I gasped when I totaled the top half of the sheet. 93 points. I checked it again. And again:

• Bears (Card C, Families): 18
• Elk (Card B, Formations): 15
• Salmon (Card C, Families): 10
• Hawks (Card D, Territorial): 25
• Foxes (Card D, Dynamic Duos): 25

I didn’t realize I’d hit the Bear Families bonus until my next to last move, but I had focused on building diverse axes of animals that I could bookend with Territorial hawk pairs. In the back half of the game, owing to the vagaries of the draw, I did something else I usually don’t do: Went for a third pair of foxes, which turned out to be massive.

Add 40 points of terrain/nature token leftovers and I think that’s 133 — 20+ points in excess of any of my best-ever games up to that point and a mark I don’t imagine I’ll hit ever again. So I quadruple-checked the score. Took a pic, swept my eyes around the room to note the jarring gulf between what just happened on this table and the oblivion of the remaining day, then packed it up.

What a morning. What a game.