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I have a bit of disposable income and the moment and took a stroll thorugh the local boardgame shop. My eyes fell on Mansion of Madness and I gotta say, the game looks like my kind of thing. Rooms, miniatures, cards, all the stuff I like in a boardgame.

I asked my Twitter followers about it and someone recommended the regular Arkham Horror instead of MoM. So I thought I just go and ask my favourite online community. Arkham Horror and Mansion of Madness. How do they work and which one do you recommend? AH seems so be mostly cards, but I like games with big boards and minis.

I can't speak to MoM, but I have played a fair amount of Arkham Horror.

It's based on HP Lovecraft's many short stories and is a cooperative game. If the players don't work together or get greedy about some item or other silliness, you'll most likely lose. Each player takes the role of an investigator, which you'll randomly draw from a pool. Each investigator has slightly different powers and starting equipment. Some are tough guys with lots of stamina, some are smart with lots of sanity, and some are a balance of the two. You'll also randomly determine which of the Old Ones you'll face. Cthulu, Nayarlethotehp, ect.

Each old one has different powers, too. Cthulu, for example, lowers all of the investigators Stamina and Sanity by 1. He's a bad ass.

You can defeat the old one by either closing a certain number of gates (portals to other dimensions) or fighting him in combat if they awaken. There are a few game mechanics that awaken him, like too many portals being open, etc. You move from location to location and have encounters. Some will give you items like A GUN! Some will knock you on your butt, like encounter a monster! All the while, you're collecting clue tokens or other items that you'll need to close the gates.

I won't go into all of the mechanics, but you'll be using dice to make checks. You'll roll a set number of d6's. Only 5 or a 6 is a success. Some checks might simply need 1 success, while others might need as many as 4. It all depends on what you're doing, but most checks (90%) just need one success and monsters need 1-3, generally speaking.

The base game does not include miniatures, but you can buy miniatures sets separately from FFG. They're pretty expensive, though.

There are a number of expansions that add new mechanics, new Old Ones, new investigators, and new locations.

Put aside 3-4 hours to play, maybe as many as 5 hours for your first game with 4 players. It's one of my favorite board games, but it can be draining to play if you get off to a bad start.

I hope that helps. You can find much more in depth reviews at BoardGameGeek, which is my go-to sight for board and card game reviews.

Arkham Horror is kind of a heartbreaker to me as I think it's a neat idea, but it's a bit too fiddly for me and my friends.

I do want to pick up a real copy of Elder Sign, which felt like it was prototyped with spare parts from AH, and I think sues some of the same artwork, but it a faster-playing cooperative dice-based game.

Elder Sign is a slimmed down version of AH, and is still pretty fun. It does use some mechanics that are similar, but is a completely different game. You can play it in 1-2 hours.

Arkham Horror usually takes 4-8 hours, with an extra 30 min just for building up the board and getting all players set to go. If you dont have a group of like-minded nerds with lots of leisure time at their hands, this game will collect a lot of dust on your shelves. In that case, you can also altogether ignore the expansions - while they add lors of flavour to the game, and some more mechanics, they also bog the game down to a standard 6-12 hours. Since AH is a true coop game, you could play this game solo.

Mansions of Madness takes less time. It's pretty much a Betrayal at the House on the hill / dungeon crawler hybrid, with some mini games thrown in (and very nice plastic miniatures). MoM cannot (easily) played alone.

Elder Signs is a dice allocation game with a reasonable amount of luck involved. Again, if your group (or you yourself) are eurogamers/strategists, they/you will have a hard time liking it. On the other hand, precisely because of that, Elder Signs is the most mainstream/compatible game for non-cultists. Whil Wheaton made an Episode for "Tabletop" in GeeksandSundry over on Youtube, if you want to check that out.

If you just like cthulhu stuff, all three games a great products. I have all of them, and while we almost never play them, I am glad to have them in my collection.

Oh, and in case you missed the kickstarter, and have some 500 EUR of spare money, you might want to check into this:

http://greeneyegames.com/product/the-necronomicon-bundle/

Short version, my only experience with the game has been poor at best. Long version, written in a review on my blog.

 kronk wrote:
Elder Sign is a slimmed down version of AH, and is still pretty fun. It does use some mechanics that are similar, but is a completely different game. You can play it in 1-2 hours.

The group was dead within 45 minutes the last time we played Elder Sign. Lots of pointless dice rolling without much of a chance to influence how the game goes. We might try it again as a fast filler game - but it's not going to be my first choice of a game to play.

I started off a boardgame group (that somehow in 7 weeks now has like... 15 boardgames to pick from between 4 people actually owning games) with zombicide, MoM and eldritch horror.

Having never played Arkham Horror but digging the mythos and horror themes in general MoM was spot on for what I wanted and I suggest if a small amount of tactics and some dice rolls and fun combat encounters sound appealing go for it. You might just need to get over the whole wanting to control everything that happens to work in your favours because usually it wont (whether the keeper house or investigators).

Eldritch Horror is also great but I would never play it solo, barely play it two player, kinda play it through but I think more people the better. It is often related to a more streamlined Arkham and I picked it over Arkham due to its play time and lack of expansions (wanted to get into boardgames but didnt want too many games that came overloaded with expansions) and Eldritch was spot on. Out of all the games that hit the table (cosmic encounters, dominion, risk versions, agricola, relic and more and more) Mansions and Eldritch are two of my faves.

Zombicide is also great but in a more slowed comic book light hearted fashion and doesn't have the same crushing punishment fun that MoM and Eldritch can offer up

I play the iOS version of Elder Sign and enjoy it, but ti's a bit different experience as it's set up for one player controlling 4 investigators... There's also a big difference with 'Locks' on dice as compared to the way it was presented on the Tabletop game.

There's some learned sense of what the dice can roll and when you should use the cards to add yellow/red dice and similar. I find (again, in the iOS version) I tend to be over-aggressive and get a lead against the Evil, but heavily depleted of resources.

Learning how to read the cards is a key skill as well. Some of the mission cards really do kind of suck, or at least are non-optimal, and should be avoided if possible... Or at least reserved for the appropriate character who has the correct skills.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh... Played Betrayal at the House on the HIll recently, which is a similar-ish game. I'm guessing at least one of the enemies is Lovecraftian.

In BatHotH, characters are typical horror movie fodder (Actually, we seemed to have a couple kids, a jock, and a professor or some such) with some stats for their movement speed, mental health, physical health, and something else. The charcater trackers were a letdown, as they used card tiles with slip-on markers that were too big, so they fell off if you looked at them wrong.

The players build a mansion by exploring. Go off the explored mansion, you draw and place a tile which is a new room which may have useful stuff in it and may force a check to see if something horrible happens (Omens?). The Omens checks generally get more difficult, and once this roll is failed, the Evil is revealed. This is randomly selected each game, and I've played through one (the player triggering the evil turned into a crazed invisible killer) and saw another (something with spiders). Sometimes the triggering player becomes the evil, sometimes they are the first victim, but the players now have a real goal. Part of the fun is you can't really prepare for it. Exploring to get gear and such is what releases it, and even if you gear up for a fight you might find that you need magic, or that you geared up and now you're the bad guy. Fun game.

 RanTheCid wrote:
The group was dead within 45 minutes the last time we played Elder Sign. Lots of pointless dice rolling without much of a chance to influence how the game goes.

Well then, at least I know it's an accurate portrayal of the source material. The CoC RPG isn't much better on this count.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is awesome. Aside from the markers, as mentioned.

My thoughts:

Elder Sign I have not played, but from the videos and "let's play"-type videos I've seen really looks like Yahtzee-Cthulhu Edition.

Arkham Horror I have played a ton of through Vassal with a friend who owned the game but moved away. I have a blast with the game, but as others have mentioned it requires a good deal of set up, space, and cooperation. A few bad rolls can make things difficult, but rarely just straight up lose you a game. Importantly, this game is basically players vs the board, as opposed to:

Mansions of Madness I've played only once, sadly. It's basically Arkham Horror on a smaller, more RPGish scale. Same concept of characters having individual stats and abilities, but instead of going throughout an entire city you have a story being played out inside a mansion (of madness). Unlike AH, one player takes the roll of the mansion and its inhabitants, so this ends up a 1 vs the players game usually. In my (again, limited) experience, it is a bit less forgiving to the players than AH as one wrong step can really end the game (even if you won't know for another couple hours...)

Betrayal at the House on the Hill: somehow this game ends up a group favorite. You start off cooperatively building the mansion until >something< happens (this something is referred to as "The Haunt" ). What that something is is determined by one of 50 built in scenarios. My only real complaint about the game is the horribly random nature of just about everything. Many times the Haunt will occur way too early, and the players have no resources, items or supplies to survive. I've had games end two turns after the Haunt triggered, which happened on the 6th or 7th game turn. Still, the whole feel of the game is amazingly fun and even with lopsided games I've always had people asking to play again.

My vote though?

Invasion From Outer Space: Pitting 1960sish Mars Attacks! style martians against the performers of a traveling Circus, the game is made by Flying Frog (makers of Last Night on Earth: the Zombie Game which shares many mechanics). Your cast of heros includes a Circus Ringmaster, Contortionist, Fire Breather, Bearded Lady and Dancing Bear, among others. The martians get deadly rayguns, vicious Zard-Beasts and all sorts of crazy shenanigans. I find the martian player/players have a little more to do than the zombie players of LNoE, thanks to the Martian Command Console, which gives you a bunch of "buttons" to press. It's really a fun game, and like most Flying Frog games comes with multiple scenarios and plenty of extra bits and bobs to make your own stories.

BoardGameGeek has some pretty good discussions on the FFG Cthulhu games.

I think Eldritch Horror is the best FFG Cthulhu game to start with. It's essentially a revision of Arkham Horror, and it has two rulebooks, one designed to simplify learning the game, the other a reference book designed to be read *during* the game.

Kronk provided a good summary of the basics.

Arkham Horror is a game that needs an afternoon ( 2-4 hours ) to play depending
on the number of players and/or supplements included. The number of cards and play pieces
can be a little daunting at first. Do not let this scare you. Once you learn to recognize the different pieces and organize
them conveniently ( by type and/or expansion ), everything runs smoothly.

In addition to the base set, the game has many expansions. All of them add some particular theme and game mechanics.
The good point is that they are all modular. You can add them to the base game in any combination you want. This
makes the replay value high because you will get very different game experience with different combinations.

Some links for help:

The FFG AH Forum:
http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/forum/15-arkham-horror/" target="_new" rel="nofollow"> http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/forum/15-arkham-horror/

The AH FAQ:
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Arkham_Horror/FAQs/Complete_Arkham_FAQ.pdf