Mansions of Madness first impression and thoughts

[Anatoli]

Anders at our club invited me and a couple of other guys to try out Mansions of Madness, it's a game that could best be described as a zoomed in version of Arkham Horror. I've been looking at this game since it was released a while ago but just had a weird gut feeling that something was off, or at least didn't directly appeal to me enough to buy it myself.

First of all I love Arkham Horror, however as I got more expansions for it the game became a lot better and more interesting - but also a damn chore to setup and clean up. As such perhaps Mansions of Madness should appeal to me since it is a (slightly) less component heavy game. But what made me hesitate was the limited amount of scripted scenarios, five to be exact.

Talking with Anders about this he said that there are indeed five scenarios (meaning 5 different floor plans) but that each scenario had 3 different stories which the game master could pick from, and that there were further variations within those 3 stories that could slightly alter them even further.

You could argue that once you have played 15 games you got your money's worth, but since boardgames (and especially Fantasy Flight Games titles) are so expensive I have this built in preference of being able to play a game without running into this dead end of already played through content.

Read the rest of my first experience with Mansions of Madness and check out a bunch of pictures of the components over at my blog:

http://anatolisgameroom.blogspot.se/2013/05/mansions-of-madness-first-impression.html

[forcedperfect]

i hope you don't give up on this one, it's my favorite CoC- themed board game ever!  the variations in each of the five in-box scenarios really do make for a different game experience for each, and the PnP expansions are both affordable and tons of fun! 

when my wife and i play, we only bring in a new investigator if it would be absolutely necessary, or if the dying investigator did something particularly awesome to merit calling in a replacement .  the 'respawning investigator' thing is important at some times, and at others it makes for a better story if someone's out of the game, in our opinion.

[Cherno]

If this game had a true cooperative mode I would buy it for sure

[Pijlie]

Haven't played it yet but am still painting the minis (which paint VERY well).

What's the problem with cooperative play? I should think that possible, just like in Zombicide?

[gnomehome]

the PnP expansions are both affordable and tons of fun! 

I really like the base game and boxed expansions - I think they're great value for money,  despite the sometimes mediocre scenario's. The print on demand expansions on the other are way to expensive IMHO and the scenarios I've tried from them are really no that great. A PoD cost 15 $ for some cards (one scenario), while the Call of The wild expansion costs 60$ for 5 scenarios, extra room tiles, extra tokens and 15 new miniatures.

This game needs a good keeper and preferably players who're familiar with the RPG. As a keeper, I not necessarily 'play to win' but play to make the game as challenging as possible for the players. In that way it really is a full 'co-op' game.

I've played it once with another keeper who had a WAAC mentality, and nobody enjoyed himself very much.

The miniatures are very, very nice and they do paint up very nice. Maybe coming to a LPL7 near you one of the next few rounds  (*cough* round 9 * cough*)

[driller]

The game is pretty good, but with the CALL OF THE WILD expansion it becomes truly great. That way, I actually prefer it to Arkham Horror. With CALL OF THE WILD, it becomes THE horror boardgame.

[Bergh]

My experince with the game not good, we tried to a couple of times. The idea with the scenarios are good, actully the game wants alot of good things. Think the setup for the keeper was rather complicated and time consuming.

Worst was the puzzles!. i get the idea of not having to many dice rolls, but we must have been above average IQ because we all think the puzzles where too easy, and essentially they just ruined the flow of the game, and we decided to just make a house rules that you character should use X turns/action to handle the puzzle, this made the game better for us.

Our gaming group have decided to try the game out again, hope we will get at better experince of the game then.