This last weekend, I went down to Las Cruces for many reasons, but really wanted to playtest The Island of Dr. Necreaux: Second Edition.  (And we will get around to comparing the First Edition and the Second Edition later in this blog).  But, we played lots of games that weekend, and one of them really surprised me: Muse.

Muse is basically a party game where you try to get your teammates to guess one of six pictures.

You give hints based one of the “inspiration” cards:

Whenever your team guesses a Masterpiece (pretty picture of art) correctly, your team gets that card as a point (like Apples to Apples).  When your team has 5 points, you win!

The rules are a little more complicated than that, but not much.  It’s a real fun party game.  We played a bunch of times early in the night and everyone had fun.

COOPERATIVE MODE!

Surprisingly, this game contains a cooperative mode!  In a 2 or 3 player version, the game becomes cooperative!  See the rules above, but basically you have to guess 5 cards before you fail 5 times.

This was a fun, low-key cooperative game.  It was late at night, and 3 of us just sat around playing this while another group finished up the Star Trek RPG.  Not a lot of thought, just fun.

Dixit

The only real problem with the game is that there are only 84 Masterpieces.  After a little bit, the cards started to repeat. 84 cards / 6 cards per play = about 14 plays before repeats.

After we played for a while, we started seeing the same “Masterpieces” again.  So, Kurt pulled out his Dixit cards and we used those for a while.  It worked fine!   We didn’t get to play with Mysterium cards, but we are pretty sure those would work fine as well.

After playing cooperatively for almost an hour with both Muse and Dixit cards, I declare this game a success.  Everyone who played wanted to get a copy.

Conclusion

Muse is pretty cheap ($18 on CoolStuffInc) and pretty fun.  It has some limited replayability, but both Dixit and Mysterium can easily be used for expansion cards.

This was a huge surprise as a cooperative game.  It was a light, fun, cheap cooperative game (for 2-3 people) that also happens to be a good party game for larger player counts.