Mysterium has had a solid work-out over the past few weeks, which makes me really happy!
We’d only played it once while I was on that holiday with the others but, as I’d needed to come home earlier than everyone else, I’d left the games up there, and they played it twice more on their own before they came back, and then we got in another couple of games of it before my sister headed home, and tonight we managed one last game before our other overseas visitor departed. Not everyone wanted to take a turn as the ghost, but 4 of the 7 players tried their hand at it at some point.
I can only reiterate how well this game worked for us in a group with mixed language skills. It must be one of the most inclusive games in my collection – you can explain the non-ghost role to anyone in about a minute; it’s co-operative without lending itself to quarter-backing (ultimately each player has to interpret their own clues, and the insights of the other players are just additional data to consider); it invites everyone to collaborate and lend their interpretations of the clues; and the core elements which make the game fun (IMO) are present in even its simplest mode of play.
Definitely the MVP of my games collection for this particular time period.
Tangentially, I heartily advocate for the “knock once for yes, twice for no” approach to the ghost telling the players whether they are right or wrong – and ensuring there’s always a delay between the first and second knock. It just adds a lovely element of tension to every answer, with the players asking themselves every time “has enough time elapsed without a second knock?”
The manual suggests it that way around. I’ve seen that some BGG folks prefer to invert it so that two knocks means yes, and I’ve never tried it that way, but it doesn’t sound like an improvement. The waiting for a second knock is exactly the same either way, but I’d rather that you spend as long as possible thinking you might be right, even when you’re wrong.