Not a week goes by without some new game appearing, packed to the gills with plastic and featuring yet more plastic in exclusive stretch goals. We live in an era where crowd-funded miniatures games are almost over-subscribed on Kickstarter. The one time these things might have actually resulted in a better game.
/pic5055174.jpg "mansions of madness second edition review")
No mobile phone image or notebook needed. Just allocate these five or ten characters/monsters/items to their various room spaces and you’re good to go. This issue could have been solved by a simple drag-and-drop mechanic built into the app itself. But unless you have a gaming table, (in which case you don’t need a save function) you still have to do a fair amount of post-session housekeeping.įirst you need to note the location of all the characters, monsters and dropped items (a mobile phone photo can often help), and second it’s handy to store characters with all their associated cards in separate baggies ready for next time.
The app does save details of items, tokens, monsters and overall mansion layout. Later, more complex investigations can push that time towards Arkham Horror realms. The introductory scenario runs to a good hour and a half, often more when you take into account cups of tea and giggling at the insane. Not all of us have a bespoke gaming table, so this is cool isn’t it? This lets you enjoy running the story rather than book-keeping, with the added bonus of not being lynched by the players for setting things up wrong. *If you’re saddened by this you can always use the app as a very trick Keeper’s aid. There’s even an atmospheric soundtrack, some nicely narrated dialogue and a nifty save game feature. Gone are the stacks of room cards and with them the chance that hours of game play can be ruined with a small set-up error. Generated room by room, the mansion is now both mysterious to explore and easy to set-up on the fly.
Mostly it accomplished it by tackling the bugbears that haunted the 1st edition. So how did it win over the jaded and entrance the rest of us? You simply couldn’t play the game without it. Not so much by the app itself, but the fact that it was compulsory. Many 1st edition fans and gaming purists were alarmed. Heresy, or a welcome breath of fresh air? Image: Fantasy Flight Games 2016 So let’s talk about the main elephant in the room for everyone: The App But I’m sure FFG would have been only too happy to offer a new “base upgrade” pack for sale, just as I’m sure saps like me would have gone out and bought it immediately. Of course there’s an argument for compatibility with 1st edition components, and credit where it’s due, the included conversion kit for these is a welcome addition. Neither is acceptable in a game at this price point. Regurgitating the same tired, unaesthetic pieces, especially when the new app dispenses with the need for them, smacks of either laziness or an unnecessarily tight budget. Now I’m all for recycling, but perhaps not when I’ve shelled out the best part of 90 quid for a “new” game, and certainly not when it doesn’t do anything for the game play. So these are a bunch of components left over from the 1st edition that have been recycled into the 2nd edition. A function now carried out by the mandatory app. But is simply placing a marker next to the miniature so impractical? In fact the slots in the base were designed to hold and keep track of wound tokens in the 1st edition. Of course the bases do also have slots to hold ID markers in case there are two identical creatures in play.
#Mansions of madness second edition review how to#
If you can spare the money, and you’re after a mystery game with a difference, take a look – it’s very much worthwhile.If you think the board looks better on the left, then you’ve forgotten how to judge properly. You might buy two video games for the same price but not get anywhere near the enjoyment from them, and most definitely might not get the same time return for your money. So yeah, it’s a pricey game, but let’s not ignore the qualities we’ve got. It’s genuinely mysterious, and with sound effects coming from the app as well it’s easy to get engrossed into this. As such you don’t know if you’re about to end up in a musty library, the back garden or a room torn apart by a monster which, incidentally, is still sat there waiting for you. You start a game with a minimal section of the mansion, and as you explore the app shows you which tile to place where. The beauty of Mansions of Madness it that unlike other games when you explore an area, you genuinely don’t know what’s round the corner. Using a digital app to set the scene, Mansions of Madness is a hefty game with a hefty price tag but has the scope and potential to become almost endless, and considering it’s an awesome game to play it’s still easy to recommend, even with a price tag just shy of £100.
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