I’ll be the first to admit that mushrooms aren’t necessarily the most thrilling theme for a board game, on paper. They’re usually just something I have at my local café as part of a big breakfast on a Sunday morning. It’s especially funny, to me, that the theming of strategic mushroom Mycelia goes as far as incorporating language like “Creation, expansion, death & rebirth” as a dramatic means to explain itself.
When it comes to mushroom kingdoms, Mario is what usually jumps to mind, but the idea of creating your own mushroom kingdom, while competing with the other players around you to achieve a certain level of dominance of the game space, turns out to be a pretty involved mechanic. A lot of tactical decisions come into play frequently, making Mycelia a fairly captivating time around the table.
Mycelia follows the lifecycle of fungi, growing mushrooms to score points, sporing those mushrooms to expand your mycelial network, and eventually seeing those mushrooms decay to unlock special actions, with the winner scoring the most points possible. The board itself is made up of triangle tiles that represent different environments and nutrients that the mushrooms need to grow. It’s dynamic and ever-changing; more tiles can be added to the board by players as one of their actions, so it’s growing and evolving as the game progresses.
At the start of the game, you’ll place your mother mushroom, and that initial placement is key; from that spot, you’ll send out spores, and you can also move it to other tiles on the board; those spores will get placed on tiles of your choice, in a “wind” direction; it’s not quite as simple as just following a line from one tile to another, instead letting you place spores on tiles, as if a gust has picked them up and carried them to the other environments along the path. It’s based on the roll of a dice, too, so you won’t get to choose exactly where they land. This took us a minute to get our heads around; it’s slightly untraditional, but made sense the more that we played, and felt lore-accurate (as lore-accurate as a game about mushrooms can be).
“Throughout, Mycleia maintains a competitive, tactical vibe, right up until the final decay.”
Insects, a key resource, allow you to move the mother mushroom around, which is essential for dropping spores in different environments so that they can then be spent to play (“fruit”) mushroom cards. Then, those mushroom meeples can be placed onto the tiles, and you can choose to spore from them, each with its own volume to do so. Quickly, it becomes a matter of area control; spawning mushrooms in certain locations so that you can access different environments, and doing so before your opponents can take over; see, if they place their mushroom where you have spores, they’ll control those spores for their own use, essentially knee-capping your progress.
Sporing from a mushroom can only be done so many times before it decays, but decaying five mushrooms (one from each slot on your player board) is how the game end is triggered, and how victory points are inevitably scored. When you do manage to decay a mushroom, it unlocks a decay action that can also prove effective if triggered early; in our game, I unlocked a decay action that allowed me to always choose the direction of the wind, essentially letting me place spores wherever I wanted from that specific mushroom, which came in very handy.
Other tactics could involve you being more aggressive, expanding and stealing other players’ spores, or disrupting their spore network (if spores aren’t connected via tiles, they can’t be used). It offers a good amount of player interaction, and while we didn’t actively target one another, it was often in our best interest to be combative so that we could get our mushrooms fruiting quickly. What makes each turn compelling is those two actions, choosing wisely, and making sure that you’re timing things correctly; a relatively simple game to set up and understand, and it didn’t take long before a lot of thought had to go into each turn, often forcing you to adapt to your opposition and abandoning your prior plans if the situation called for it. Throughout, Mycleia maintains a competitive, tactical vibe, right up until the final decay.
In a nice touch, Mycelia incorporates accurate botanical-style illustrations with over 69 mushrooms that can be found in the wild. It’s beautifully ugly, in a way, the same as the mushrooms themselves; I love the colours of the triangles as the board grows, each card has its own distinct style to it, and the mushroom and mother mushroom meeples are extremely high-quality. There’s even a designated space for cards to be slipped under your player board for easy tucking; it feels like a premium game, made with a lot of love and care.
I didn’t go into Mycelia expecting it to have so much strategic depth; even with only three of us, it didn’t take us long to start encroaching on each other’s territory, slowly taking over the tiles and maximising our special actions. As a battle for space and resources, it’s satisfying to grow, fruit, spore and decay, making mushrooms far more tactical and intriguing than ever before.
Mycelia is available now in all good board game stores. Thanks to VR Distribution for providing a copy of Blue and Perspectives OG for this review.
About the Author
Luke Mitchell
he/him
Luke spends his time making radio, playing video games, binge-watching TV, getting unreasonably invested in wrestling, hosting bear events and hanging out with his beautiful pets.
