Board Game: Mansions of Madness!

There's just the one mansion, actually. 

The Game: Mansions of Madness
The Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Time: About 4 hours
Players: Me, Michelle, Megan, Gus

Game Play: Mansions of Madness is one of the many games in the Arkham Horror family, along with Eldritch Horror (but not Cthulhu Wars, which is a different company). It plays a lot like Arkham Horror, except that it's app-driven. So everyone picks an investigator, and you pick a scenario (I have no idea how many there are or what they're called, because the booklet just says "play this one first time out" and the app didn't really give a list), and then you're off to the races! (Which would have terrified H.P. Lovecraft, arf arf.)

A bad picture of the app

The app tells you what to do, for the most part. You set out the room tiles (a la Betrayal at House on the Hill) in the order it says, and place tokens for Search, Explore, NPCs, and whatever else. Two actions per turn, which you can use to move, um, search, explore, talk to NPCs, and also attack monsters when they show up. 

The aforementioned monsters

Game mechanics are pretty simple. You've got a handful of stats, you roll said stats when told to. The dice are d8s with elder signs and magnifying glasses. Elder signs are successes, magnifying glasses aren't, but you can spend Clue tokens to buy them as successes (and then there are a bunch of items that do a "change all clues to successes in a given type of roll" thing). Everything pretty much collapses back to that mechanic, though it's expressed in different ways. Sometimes you succeed by rolling a certain number of successes, sometimes the more you roll the better you do (combat, f'rex), and sometimes you're rolling to negate Damage or Horror.

Before the madness; mansion under construction

Damage is fairly interesting. You've got Damage and Horror cards, which either get dealt to you and you read them and following the instructions, or they get dealt facedown (usually when you read them they'll do a thing and then flip face down, too). Some effects "heal" face down cards. Get too many of the respective types and you wind up Insane or Wounded, and then if you get too many again you're out. But it's much more forgiving, and frankly much more interesting, than previous games' applications of damage - it's not just "get too much damage and you're out." Oh, and if you go Insane, it can change the win conditions, but I'm the only one who went Insane in our playthrough (gibber-gibber, cluck-cluck, my old man's a mushroom, etc) and all it did was make me a little shifty. 

Investigators at work!

After the investigators have their turn, the "Mythos Phase" happens, usually beginning with something weird afflicting one character, sometimes by name, sometimes "the investigator with the lowest BMI" or something. Monsters move around, they attack, you avoid damage or you don't, on we go!

Opinions: I do have them.

AAAAHH THE HAND OF CTHULHU!

So, on the one hand (lol), this game plays a lot like Arkham Horror without the players having to do a lot of the work. The app does much of the calculation, story progression, and so forth, and that allows for a greater speed of game play (this game took us 4 hours, sure, but a) a lot of that was setup and b) a game of Arkham Horror typically takes at least 5, and that's if you lose quickly). The production values are amazing, and the app seems to work well.

On the other...I dunno. Maybe what I want in a board game is not one more reason to stare at a fucking device. Also, one of the issues with a lot of Arkham games is the downtime between players getting to do things, and this game still has that like whoa. 

All in all, I think it's a well-done game, but I'm not sure if, gun to my head, I'd choose it over one of the other Mythos games or My Father's Work (which is also app-driven but has more for the players to do on a turn-by-turn basis). 

Keep? Yep, definitely need to play it again to get a better bead on it.