Hooo-boy. Look at that title. You must think this review's going to be a real gusher. I'm going to sit here and tell you all about how great Mansions of Madness, the new Cthulu game from Fantasy Flight, is, and how I loved Arkham Horror and now there's a more thematic version of it, how it's all the fun of a Call of Cthulu campaign packed into half an evening.
NOPE.
Don't get me wrong, this IS a rocket-powered haunted-house experience. It's fast, it's streamlined -- BUT it also moves forward quickly, is always racing toward the finish in the straightest, most direct way possible. It is not subtle in any way, shape, or form. Being rocket-powered, in other words, is a mixed-blessing.
As with all my reviews, this is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, and I assume that you are somewhat familiar with the play mechanics and contents of the game. If you don't - there are many excellent reviews on the BoardGameGeek that discuss this, and I am not going to do a better job than those guys.
Let's begin.
Mansion Dung
I'll start by talking about the central problem with this game: The fact that it takes Descent-style play mechanics and repurposes them into the wrong genre, and how this decision destroys the pacing of the game.
Now, I'm going to stop for a moment and say that I love vanilla Descent. Descent is a great game that accomplishes exactly what it's going for. It's frantic, it's play mechanics keep it moving forward, and it successfully captures the thrilling feeling of a band of heroes pushing back against a powerful outer force. So, mechanically and on the surface, this seems like a good fit for a haunted house game - instead of the fantasy hero pushing back against the cruel Overlord, we have the brave investigator pushing back against the powerful outer force of the haunted mansion. The problem is with pacing. In Descent, the players hit the ground running. They kick open the door to the dungeon ready to bust some Beastman and smash some Skeleton. But this doesn't work in a haunted house game. Haunted house games should replicate their source material - haunted house fiction.
In haunted house fiction, there is always a creepy calm before the storm. It meanders a little bit. The characters don't start knowing that they are threatened. In the haunted house genre, the protagonists show up to the haunted house and a) don't believe or know it's haunted, or b) DO believe it's haunted, but can't find any evidence or are not equipped to properly deal with it once they do find it. Over the course of a haunted house narrative, strange things become apparent. The supernatural tomfoolery gradually escalates until the remaining beleaguered protagonist(s) Must Escape This F'ing House Alive.
Mansions of Madness throws these important genre tropes right out the window. The protagonists show up and, in both a meta-game and mechanical fashion, know immediately that they are in a Bad Place and that bad things are going to go down. The mechanics reinforce this. The Keeper starts gaining threat from the word go and can unload all sorts of nasties on the investigators, and it only gets worse. Escalation is definitely part of horror, but Mansions of Madness feels like it ramps up too quickly or from too many directions. After a couple of games, players acted less like Investigators and more like a SWAT team, kicking down the door and sweeping through the house with grim determination, ignoring anything but getting through the clue-chain. In other words, they started acting like the heroes from Descent.
(As an aside, Betrayal at House on the Hill has played out for me as a game with, more often than not, a short and disappointing anti-climactic finish from way too much randomness, but at least they got the pacing right.)
I am not happy with how this game is paced and how the scenarios play out. It occurs to me that there's a movie that plays very similar to how Mansions of Madness goes down; where the protagonists already know that the house is haunted and show up to kick some ass. That movie is called GhostBusters. And, I'm sorry to say, with the current mechanics in place, Mansions of Madness fails as a haunted house game. Let me draw an important distinction here: it doesn't fail AS A GAME, and is still fun, as long as you think of the game as The Real GhostBusters of The 20s: Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good.
Mansion Run
You know what else suffers from this rapid pacing? The game's story. There's an afterward in the game's rulebook that stays how part of horror is a connection to the characters and the telling of a story, and that the designer (Corey Konieczka) was trying to make a more story-driven horror game. Corey, I love you baby, you've done great work, I am really looking forward to Blood Bowl Team Manager, but you absolutely failed on this one.
The narratives of Mansions of Madness are a house of cards. Literally, that's not a joke - the story is cards. Parts of the story are written on tiny cards (split between the clues and the events) that you read through as the scenario progresses, and there simply isn't enough text to make you care. Have you ever done a "campfire story"? You know, where everyone sits around the campfire, person 1 starts the story and says a few sentences, then passes to person 2, who tries to continue the story in a few sentences, then passes to person 3, etc. etc? If you've ever done this, you know that the end result is a disjointed, bizarre narrative that doesn't flow properly and is only tenuously connected to person 1's original premise. This is the exact sort of story you get with these scenarios. One adventure even ends with a sudden "Rocks fall, everybody dies." (and no, I am not making that up).
The problem is that there's simply not enough time and not enough text to make the premise work. If the Investigators want to win, they have to race around and pick up the clues as fast as they can...who cares about that story at the beginning? The cards themselves are no help: event cards have to be general enough to work with all scenarios, and suffer greatly for it. And, lastly, the Keeper is expressly forbidden by the rules from looking at the event cards, so they don't have a way to create an overarching narrative to tie everything together. The whole thing plays out as a farce. Here's a thought: this board game takes you to Disneyland, leads you into the Haunted Mansion, shoves you into the TombMobile, triples the speed of the ride, and then asks you to "enjoy the story". Not going to happen.
Mansion Fun
Well now that I've taken a dump on the story and the pacing, what's left? Only the rest of the game, which is pretty darn awesome. The combat system works well, the turns play fast and are streamlined but still present interesting options, the minis are great, blah blah blah yakkity smackity. You know all this from the other reviews. So I'm going to focus on the game's best feature: the modularity of its scenario design. The game's scenario-bsed paradigm is brilliant for the way that it could easily fix any problem with the game, because - as many astute reviewers have pointed out - the game system in the box is far, far larger than the included scenarios. If you've played Dominion you know what I am talking about - how different each game of Dominion can be with different "seed cards" from different expansions. Mansions of Madness has a very similar principle. This is a totally modular system that could support a ton of different play types, and I am greatly impressed by it.
Let's look at the included scenarios with Mansions of Madness for an excellent illustration of this point:
One scenario has a lot of "player screwage" - players trying to kill other players, including one player that might switch sides during the game
One scenario has a lot of combat against a tough, regenerating opponent that you have to manage, rather than fight directly
One scenario has a little combat, but a lot of environmental hazards that you have to take into consideration
One scenario just stinks and the less said the better (Classroom Curses, if you're curious - please do not play this scenario!)
One scenario has a lot of combat against a tide of weak opponents that can turn deadly if you let them cluster (as an aside, this is probably the strongest scenario, as the game's rapid pacing and mechanics fits very well with the scenario's narrative)
There is a marked difference between game #1 and game #5. The Investigators have different priorities, different builds. Oh, sure, there are similarities: the Investigators still rocket down the clue-trail and the story is a disconnected mess. But the individual game turns of the two scenarios feel very different from each other. In one, the Investigators are concerned with positioning, area control, and offense. In the other, they are suspicious of each other and the threat is much more internal. They really do play out like different games.
Man, I just can't say enough good things about the scenario system that Mansions of Madness uses. It's so flexible and modular, you can basically do anything with it. Let me give you an example of how you can easily fix my pacing problems and story problems that I've noted earlier, using nothing but a small tweak to out-of-the-box mechanics and some cards:
To fix the pacing problems, you just implement a simple rule built into the scenario: until the first event card is resolved OR the first clue is resolved, the Keeper doesn't gain any threat. This means that the Investigators can take a little time and scope out the mansion at the beginning. However, certain exploration cards might grant the Keeper threat or global advantages, so exploring the mansion willy nilly will cost the investigators. Since it's dull for the Keeper to sit and watch the Investigators without doing much, you might do something like allow the Keeper to draw and potentially play one Mythos card per turn, to allow him to mess with the Investigators without going into full-blown Keeper Attack mode.
To fix the problems with the disjointed narrative, each scenario simply needs many more event cards (instead of the ubiquitous five event cards for each scenario, there could be twenty...with much shorter time counters between them, so that the overall game length is only slightly increased.) The majority of these cards do not have to do anything except advance the story. Most of them would just have flavor text and detail the spooky goings on in the mansion, or to foreshadow later event cards. This would help to beef up the narrative thread. Instead of having guys suddenly pop out of closets or monsters just show up out of nowhere, the cards would set up these events and make each scenario more coherent. You can even make "major events" and "minor events" to separate the story events from the mechanical events.
As you can see, just a few simple changes would fix all of my major problems. That's how great the scenario system is - you can subvert or tweak the mechanics very easily to get the effect you want.
Mansion Done
More than any other board game I've ever played, the first expansion of Mansions of Madness is going to make or break it. If the expansion contains more incoherent mansion rocket-rides, with the Investigators tearing around the clue-trail to the exclusion of everything else, this game will become nothing more than Spookhouse Descent. If it contains well-paced scare scenarios with a strong narrative and different, plot-related mechanics and player choices, it will break out and establish itself as the premiere narrative board game. But all of the extra minis, combat cards, equipment, and new tiles won't matter if the game can't get the fundamentals right. Careful scenario design is critical to this game's success.
That's not to say that Mansions of Madness won't be a successful game, even if the expansion is just more of the same. Some people would really like Descent's mechanics but hate the dungeon theme; those people will enjoy Mansions of Madness. And the hard-core Lovecraftians will enjoy seeing the Shuggoths and Cthonians in the game, even if the tone is more like "GhostBusters" than "The Unnamable". But for those of us looking for a thematic horror experience in board game form - and I think there are a great, great many of us, judging from the reviews and posts on the internet - we'll have to keep waiting.
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