Mycelia

• Designer: Daniel Greiner
• Publisher: Ravensburger
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 9+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with copy provided by Ravensburger

Mycelia is one of a number of mushroom themed games that is coming to the market in the near future.  In this deck-building game, you need the support of mysterious forest dwellers to improve your deck, develop new and better skills, and bring the sacred dewdrops from your forest to the Shrine of Life in order to receive the forest goddess’ support.

Each player gets a player board, which is seeded with 20 Dewdrops in an identical pattern (copied from a setup card).  In the basic game, players place an “A” and “B” action card under their board.  Each player also starts their identical deck of 6 start cards (the only difference being an icon in the corner), shuffles them and takes a starting hand of 3 cards.  The main deck of 40 cards is shuffled and a market of 5 face up cards is dealt to the table.

Beginning with the start player, turn will be taken in order until the end of a round when one or more players has cleared all the dewdrops off their board.  On a turn, the active player plays all 3 cards from their hand, one at a time.  In general, the goal of the game is to remove all the dewdrops from your player board, and the main method of doing this is moving dewdrops onto the shrine space on said board.  Many of the actions on the cards allow you to manipulate the position of those dewdrops, though some allow you to simply outright remove dewdrops.  As dewdrops are removed, they are placed on the central tree shrine. Each time this is filled, a die ends up being rolled which will add a few dewdrops back onto the player’s boards.  As you play a card, you generally cannot interrupt this with other actions or cards.  When you finish resolving the card, place it face up in your discard pile.

At any point in your turn, you can also buy cards from the market.  The cost for each card is in the upper right, and you must be able to discard a number of leaves equal to the cost to take the card; the new card being placed on top of your draw deck.  Leaves are the currency of the game, similar to coins in Dominion – many cards generate these coins which must  be used the turn that you make them.

Also during your turn, you can take any of the actions found on cards under your board. In the basic game, there are two options.  “A” = pay a leaf to discard the market and draw a new one.  “B” pay 3 leaves to move any dewdrop one space orthogonally.

When your turn is over, make sure that all your played cards are in the discard pile and refresh the market to 5 cards.  Then look at the tree shrine to see if it is full (20 dewdrops in a 4p game).  If so, rotate it once fully, this will cause the dewdrops to fall out, and it will also roll the die – and this determines the locations of the new dewdrops to be placed on your board.

The next player then takes their turn. Continue this until someone removes the last dewdrop from their board.  At this point, continue to the end of the current round.  If the tree shrine is full, you no longer rotate it.  The winner of the game is the player with the empty board.  If multiple players have emptied their board, the tie is broken in favor of the most leaves left.

My thoughts on the game

I’m a big fan of deckbuilding games, and so I’m inclined to try out each one that I come across.  This was sold as a light entry-level game for the genre, as the age of 9+ would suggest, and I think it does an admirable job of doing just that.  The basic cards are admittedly fairly simple, though there are more advanced cards that you can add to the game once you get the hang of it.

What I like about Mycelia (as far as deck builders go) is that while you are trying to shape your deck to fit your strategy; there is more to it – the main goal is to empty your board of dewdrops.  Some players will try to draft cards which grant them more movement powers so that the dewdrops can be moved to the shrine while others might focus on the cards that allow you to directly remove dewdrops.

All of the basic cards are really quite simple, and while from a gamer perspective, maybe that’s not awesome – but, I can say, it’s really great for people who aren’t used to the idea of deckbuilding.  It’s really intuitive to see what cards will work with your current plan, and the system of getting them immediately is nice too.  In Mycelia, every card you buy goes on the top of your deck, so you can use it on the next turn.  Thus, you might sometimes be adding a card for a long term purpose, or you might simply be buying a card because it will work perfectly with your current board setup.

The components are great.  The central tree shrine might be a little overdone; but it looks great on the table, and it’s a nice eye-catching gimmick.  In the end, it could have been a regular board and the players could have rolled the die on their own… But, awards seem to reward games with table presence, and the little spinner thing does make people want to stop and see what is happening in the game.  The artwork on the cards is also quite nice with individual art for each different variety of card.  We had a few issues with some of the icons – the use of the ghosty dewdrops X’d out was confusing at first, but we resolved that by closely reading the examples in the rules.

 There is an international version (in English) available, but in case you can only find a German version; don’t worry – the text on the cards is all flavor text, so you can still play the game!  The games are fairly quick with most of ours actually coming in around 30 minutes. If you move to the advanced version, you can have asymmetric boards as well as three different special action tiles; but this actually seems to keep the game length the same.  While you have more to think about, you also have many more options to move around the dewdrops which gets them off your board sooner.

For an introductory deckbuilder, Mycelia has a lot going for it.  It has worked well with the gamers in my regular group, but it has been a success with my casual gaming friends who were able to grasp the deckbuilding concept in just a few turns.  (And now I can get them to try Dominion….)

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale
• Neutral.
• Not for me…