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Had a chance to play Mansions of Madness yesterday at the last day of the FFG Arkham Nights event.

the TL;DR of it is:

Great Lovecraftian dungeoncrawl with a few similarities to Descent but less adversarial. A few similarities to Claustrophobia as well if you are familiar with that Helldorado boardgame.


A bit more detail:

Tim Uren was The Keeper for the demo. It was quite immersive since he was the guy who wrote the background material for the game.

Great looking miniatures. Shoggoth, Mi-go, Cthonian and hounds of tindalos are the monsters. Humanoid antagonists consist of cultists, zombies, maniacs with axes. All have variable powers so you dont know how hard one is to kill just because you killed his brother 2 seconds ago. 8 investigators from the Arkham Horror base game. Jenny Barnes, Ashcan Pete, Joe Diamond, etc.



Double sided modular tiles. Great art.

Bases apparently work with Arkham Horror monster chits.

Lots of puzzle solving in the scenario we played. Very tense. Lots of choices to make that could make or break your success at the scenario. The theme doesnt seem pasted on top of the mechanics. The theme is also portrayed very well since it actually makes you feel a bit of dread and nail biting anxiety from elements of uncertainty. You can play the same scenario many times and chances are it wont play the same.

Overall great game design.

Game play was 2 hours for us and we finished a bit early since the Keeper had no way of being able to thwart the investigators. I would say it could have gone on 30 more minutes if it played to completion with all the time counters. For a beginner game with lots of discussion during the game about actions we should take, it went fairly slow for those 2 hours. I think the game could average about 90 minutes after the rules have been properly internalized.

Its everything I wanted Castle Ravenloft to be. And more... since it is lovecraftian.

Its a bit on the expensive side, coming in at a staggering $80 for a game that contains so little in comparison to Descent. You can also bank on their being expansions for this game too. It pretty much screams "expand me". Likely released early Q1 2011.

It can potentially fall prey to the dictator gamer archetype commonly found in Pandemic, so a bit of caution there as we had one in our group that got chosen to play and it was annoying to say the least. Like so many other games, the tone is set by the company you keep. I was also hoping for more variety in the plastic gribbly department (See: Expansions).