Mansions of Madness (First Impressions)
28 Oct 2019This is not a review, more of a introspection of the game, a little cynical about my former approach to rating games. Mansions of Madness is a coherent full experience that captures aspects of cosmic horror, yet making a game play experience that is both accessible and demanding.
Mansions of Madness is a cooperative game (until you may or may not go crazy). Players are investigators (pulled from FFG’s collection of novels in the universe), who run through a set of narratively linked encounters with the eponymous Mansion.
It’s essentially a board gamers version of Betrayal at House on the Hill. Mechanically it is linked to the Arkham Horror series of games with the familiar game idioms that help you familiarize with the game quicker as it borrows concepts from the arborescent evolution of the games over time. These mechanical staples are cross-pollinated with concepts from other games that the company has developed.
The idioms include elements such as the ubiquitous 2 actions per turn, Damage and Horror (Cthulhu game stables) are tracked via X-Wing style cards where they have a ‘face-up’ effect on one side and use the face-down for general damage. If you’ve played games in a similar vein in the past, the game play elements pick up easy and allow you to get up to speed fast. Insanity plays out similar to a combination of the Betrayal mechanic (tbh is more akin to Dead of Winter than Betrayal) and the weaknesses in Arkham Horror the card game, when players hit a threshold they gain a insanity card that provides them a secret condition to win the game, sometimes it’s aligned with the players, restricts the character, or outright betrays everyone else. The insanity cards seem to be a fun mechanism that I’ve heard many players talk about. In our game everyone went insane and were still cooperating, only one person ‘lost’ because they didn’t set enough rooms on fire.
The app look and plays much like the Descent or LOTR: Journeys in Middle-Earth. FFG is refining an adventure game formula that combines the best aspects of their game library, and employs digital apps to keep bookkeeping away from the board. The application both provides storybeats as well as handles the Mythos phase of the game. It also obfuscates the layout of each scenario and randomizes it everytime you play a scenario, you still will know the story and the events within the rooms. However the replay value within these games is the characters and the comical failures that come up in these kinds of games. The game also uses the app to handle tests (attacking, being attacked, evading, mythos), each monster has a unique set of attacks and evasion tests that employ story elements as well.
The set up is slow as the game has many miniatures, cards, bases, and tiles. This cornucopia of pieces affect the game when a new room is revealed. It takes a minute to look for the tile, populating the tile with tokens and miniatures. This is a trade-off for not having the layout be static. The game time is definitely long, the introductory scenario runs from 1 hour to 90ish minutes, we took 3+ hours to finish that scenario. To be fair, as in initial comparison goes, a game of Betrayal runs at about an 1-2 hours. I would prefer this game to Betrayal any day.
I found the gameplay to be very fun, our characters had character and the story playing out in our heads from die rolls and the app lent itself to a good time. The in-game character development employed the best aspects of horror movie tropes and pulling from a pool of Cthulhu flavored random events.
My character a secretary was running around killing monsters and cultists with a fire extinguisher, and was left paranoid from a winged serpent giving birth to a miniature version of itself. Other characters we had included an Agatha Christy spell slinger who kept dropping candles and wanted to watch the world burn, and a Catholic grave digger who frantically attempted to defuse alarms and kept of failing right before finishing the solution.
All things considered, I really enjoyed this game. I would definitely like to play it again, the price tag is hefty, but it gets me excited about other games that employ applications as well such as LOTR: Journeys in Middle-Earth.