| 👨👩👧👦 | Players: 2-4 |
| ⏳ | Time: 40-90 minutes |
| 🎂 | Ages: 10+ |
| ⚙️ | Mechanisms: Card Drafting, Engine Building, Resource Management |
Mycelia is a game about growing mushrooms. No, not for your dinner, but to help the forest ecosystem. Doesn’t that sound spore-some?!
In this game your job is to grow the best mushroom kingdom. Each player starts with just a single mother mushroom, and from there you expand by spreading spores. Spores can be used at plant extra mushrooms, adding to your network and increasing your options for further growth.
You can have five extra mushrooms active at a time, but once they have spored twice, they decay and need to be replaced. As they decay, they give you powerful bonuses, either one off or ongoing, but they also act as a countdown for the end of the game.
We’ve played quite a bit now and wow, does your brain get a workout with this puzzler! While each action you can take is quite simple, how they all connect, much like the network you are trying to build, is quite complex.
We like how you have to balance your ecosystem in order to do well. You can only spend spores that are part of the same network, so you’re constantly trying to make sure you keep everything connected. Take a spore from the wrong space, or decay a mushroom at the wrong time and you can find yourself in a bit of a mess.
You’ve also got the other players to contend with, and it’s quite possible for them to break up or even take control of parts of your network, so you’ve got to make sure you keep an eye on them and don’t give them mush-room to hamper your plans!
We did find it tough at times to keep track of what belongs to your network and what doesn’t. It’s constantly changing and there were times we’d go to spend a spore only to suddenly realise that it no longer belonged to us. The ‘morel’ of the story is that you really have to pay attention to everyone’s move and not just your own to keep on top of it.
To cap it all off, Mycelia is a very thematic, engaging experience. It manages to capture the theme of growth and decay that’s so typical of nature into a game that takes about 45 minutes to play. The production is absolutely gorgeous (♥ the fuzzy box insert!) and the game really is a ton of fun(gi!)
You can see this post on Instagram here and if you are interested you can find out more about the game on the Split Stone Games website!
The copy of Mycelia used for this review was provided to A Tale of Two Meeples by VR Distribution
The Boardgame Detective 