2023 and 2024 seem to have been good years for fungi, with two games called Mycelia appearing, along with a couple called Mycelium, as well as Elizabeth Hargrave’s Undergrove. Here I’m going to take a look at one of the Mycelia games.
Mycelia is a 1–4 player, age 10+, strategy game with a 40–90 minute estimated play time, designed by J.J. Neville and published by UK-based Split Stone Games. The publisher describes it as: ‘A dynamic game of tactics – a competition for space and resources to create your own mushroom kingdom. The game follows the life cycle of fungi. Growing mushrooms to score points, sporing them to expand your mycelial network and eventually seeing them decay to unlock special actions.’
The box contains 69 gorgeously illustrated mushroom cards, pleasantly chunky dual-layer player mats (with recesses for spore counters and slots for cards underneath—this is a game you can play on a stormy sea without pieces scattering; well, a mild swell anyway), thick card map tiles (unlike most games that have hexes or squares, these are triangular, and I feel the sharp corners could easily be damaged), wooden mushroom and ‘mother’ mushroom tokens, a passel of spore tokens and counters, some insects, and a few other bits and bobs. The manual is clear and nicely illustrated. The game shouts high quality throughout.
The overall aim is to grow and eventually decay mushrooms, sporing and spreading as the game progresses.
More specifically, players can trigger mushrooms on the map to spore, scattering spore tokens as the wind blows; they can then use those spores to play cards in their hand (known as fruiting), which adds to their final score and lets them place another mushroom token on the board; after sporing multiple times, mushrooms decay, offering the player a bonus such as taking an extra movement or moving another player’s token.
The game starts with a small initial map of tiles, some of which will have insects on them. Players lay out their player mats with five mushroom tokens on top, place their mother mushroom on a tile of their choosing and are given three mushroom cards. Draw decks of tiles and cards are placed nearby and the top three mushroom cards are revealed.
On each turn, players take two different actions from the following six options:
- move—move any of your mushrooms up to two spaces; you can’t enter any space occupied by another player’s mushrooms (which offers possibilities of players blocking each other); if you land on a tile containing insect token, take it;
- explore—add another triangle tile to the map; place an insect token on the tile if that’s indicated on the tile;
- spore—choose a mushroom to spore, roll the wind direction die, and spread the appropriate number of spore tokens (two for the mother mushroom, and the number indicated on the mushroom card for normal fruiting ones) out in that direction; for fruiting mushrooms, you also move the spore counter along one step, until decay can be triggered;
- fruit—play a card from your hand; for this, you need the appropriate number and types of spore (as determined by the colour of the map tile containing the spore) indicated on the card in a connected region of the map; you can use other players’ spores as long as they’re on tiles containing your mushroom token or on adjacent tiles;
- decay—when a fruiting mushroom has spored twice, you can slide its card under your player mat and return the mushroom token to the top, making that space available for fruiting again;
- discover—add a new card to your hand from the displayed set or from the deck.
You can also spend insect tokens to take a few additional actions: refreshing the card row or moving another player’s mother mushroom; or you can discard three mushroom cards to gain an insect.
The game ends as soon as any player has at least one decayed mushroom in all five slots on their player mat. Players’ scores are the sum of all fruited and decayed mushrooms, plus any insect tokens, with an additional bonus for the player who ended the game.
This is a quick game to pick up and very pleasant to play, with a couple of different brain-taxing strategy elements: you need to manoeuvre your mushroom tokens into appropriate spaces on the map such that spores will end up where you need them in order to fruit the cards in your hand—at least, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction; and all the while, you need to keep an eye on where opponents are placing their tokens in case they block yours or ‘steal’ your spores—and, of course, you’re trying to do exactly the same to them.
The game includes some automation cards, providing solo play options. The automated player focuses on fruiting and decaying mushrooms to trigger the game end, so solo play feels a bit like a race, lacking some of the fun strategy you’d have with real opponents.
Comparisons
At the start I noted, that there seem to be a lot of mushroom games around—a veritable fungal infection! Since there are so many, I thought I’d spend a little time looking at some of the alternatives to Mycelia. First, there’s the ‘other’ Mycelia; this is a light, whimsical deck-building game, in which players compete to remove ‘dewdrops’ from their boards by playing card actions. It’s eye-catching (especially the somewhat gimmicky 3d ‘shrine of light’), very cute and approachable; above all, it’s friendly and unthreatening—there are no actions which attack opposing players. However, the mushroom aspect of the game is purely incidental—the adorable critters on the cards could be, well, anything at all with the same gameplay. There’s a full review at https://zatu.com/mycelia-review/.
The ‘biggie’ that can’t be left out is Undergrove; as we’ve come to expect from Elizabeth Hargrave, the gameplay is detailed and well thought through, and Beth Sobel’s artwork is outstanding. It’s a tile-laying, resource management game, in which you play a tree, sending out root tendrils into a mushroom-filled forest floor and sprouting seedlings—the biological basis of the game works well here, as it does in Mycelia (er, the first Mycelia, I mean). My impression is that the mechanics of the game involves a lot of hard work for too little reward and the actions can be a bit samey—running the engine to pump carbon around the system is a bit of a grind, interspersed with a few more interesting bits.
And then there’s the singular Mycelium, in which you expand your mycelium network to locate nutrients for your ‘mushling’ colony. The game mechanics are intriguing and provide for a lot of player interaction, but as with the second Mycelia game, the mushrooms, spores and nutrients could be anything—they’re just player, money and prize pieces, and you’re laying tracks between them. Because it’s fun, I’ll mention one more: Wonder Woods, a light game of logic and bluffing. Game setup sets hidden values for different mushroom types, and players have partial knowledge of these values; on each turn, players collect mushrooms of the different types, using their knowledge of value and making guesses about what other people might know based on their choices. A very quick game (20–25 minutes), and sure to be quite raucous. You can find a full review at https://zatu.com/wonder-woods-review/.
If you search on BoardGameGeek, you’ll find yet more mushroom games, but I think this is enough for now.
Final Words
An oddly large crop of mushroom-based games has appeared recently (is it the humidity?), and they’re all quite different. Do you want light play or heavy; deck-building or resource management; high or low player interaction; whimsical cuteness a or vaguely realistic biological game?
J.J. Neville’s Mycelia is the one that I find most compelling thanks to its mix of strategy and randomness, as well as the high production quality of the game. (This isn’t to say the others are in any way bad game – I’d settle down to play all of them with the right group of people).
Before I leave, I want to let you know that an expansion, Mycelia: North America is coming soon, adding new game mechanics and increasing the upper number of players to five.
