RogerBW's Blog

The new Secrets & Lies expansion for Mysterium is designed by Oleksandr Nevskiy and Oleg Sidorenko.

The first expansion, Hidden Signs, didn't add any new gameplay. This one does… sort of.

First of all there are 42 new Vision cards, in the same style as before.

There are also six pairs of new cards for Characters, Locations and Objects. That adds variation, but the play of the game is the same.

The new gameplay component is the "Story Cards", 18 pairs of cards which, it is suggested, should replace the Objects.

These will be rather more challenging, though, because they depict circumstances related to the death: a game of poker with everyone in masks, a policeman at his desk, a dog race, a figure with a petrol can near a burning barn, a rainy night and an open car…

I'm not sure how well these will interact with the Location cards: a greyhound race in the nursery? Perhaps events at the race were the inspiration for the murder? The equivalent expansion for the original Polish version of the game called them "Motive Cards", and conceptually that might work a bit better.

The very obvious missing element here, though it would prolong the game, would be to use the Story Cards as well as the Object Cards, presumably by adding some rounds to the game and considering the number of Psychic Points required for each number of cards at the final stage. There's some work being done on boardgamegeek to develop this.

So now, clearly, I need to design and 3d-print a new inlay for the box to hold everything. The components and cards escape all the time already, even without adding in this expansion.