Mansion of Madness | Nerdologists https://nerdologists.com Where to jump in on board games, anime, books, and movies as a Nerd Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:34:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://nerdologists.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/nerdologists-favicon.png Mansion of Madness | Nerdologists https://nerdologists.com 32 32 Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition – 40 through 31 https://nerdologists.com/2023/11/top-100-games-of-all-time-2023-edition-40-through-31/ https://nerdologists.com/2023/11/top-100-games-of-all-time-2023-edition-40-through-31/#comments Thu, 16 Nov 2023 14:23:28 +0000 https://nerdologists.com/?p=8516 A lot of games have already made my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition. Join me for games 40 through 31.

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We’re well into the list at this point with my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition. Which games make it into the 40 through 31 range? There are two new games to this section, maybe three, and a couple of games that have had some drops. Which ones are on the move? And which ones would you want to play? Join me on Malts and Meeples as I go through 40 through 31.

Catch up on my Top 100 Games (of all Time) 2023 Edition:

100 through 91
90 through 81
80 through 71
70 through 61
60 through 51
50 through 41

Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition – 40 through 31

40. Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

As I always say, I’m not the biggest fan of social deduction games, in fact, there is only one that I like and that’s Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. And a lot of that is because it’s not just a social deduction game, there is more going on. And you always have something to base your conversation off of. A lot of time, in social deduction games, it’s more just taking a stab in the dark as you talk hoping someone will slip up. It’s not until later rounds where it is meaningful.

So, what makes Deception: Murder in Hong Kong different? I think it’s the role of the Forensic Scientist. They send up reports from their basement lab, basically they’re the person who runs the game, and from that lab they give you clues. The murder took place in a “school” the victim was “athletic” things like that.

Everyone else is trying to piece together those reports to figure out who the murderer is. Because it’s someone in the group. And because it’s someone in the group, they are trying to put suspicion on everyone else. But how to the reports help, you might ask? They help because everyone has a set of clues and murder weapons in front of them. So it helps narrow down what it can be. The detectives on the good side need to figure out which combo of clue and murder weapon are the cause. And of course the murder and their accomplice are trying to throw everyone off the sent.

Buy Deception: Murder in Hong Kong

39. Crokinole

Next up is one of the new games on the list. But I should say, it’s new to me. It’s certainly now a new game. In fact, it’s the oldest game on my list. Crokinole is a game of flicking a disc trying to land it in the center of the board. There is a groove there that you can land it into. But if you don’t do that, it’s about trying to get points and keeping your opponents pieces off the board as much as possible.

I like this one as a simple flicking game. You flick with very little thought for objectives beyond get it in to the middle. And while I love the getting up and moving around in PitchCar, Crokinole is fast to get to the table and much simpler in what you are doing. In fact, you can only shoot from a small quarter of the big board. And you can’t get up from your seat. The just simplicity of that system makes it a great game to sit, play, and chat while you’re playing it.

Buy Crokinole

38. Kohaku

Kohaku is the first of two tile laying games in a row here. And I really like Kohaku for how pretty it is, and also the simplicity of game play. You take two tiles on your turn, one scoring and one fish, that are adjacent to each other on the middle board. Then you place them anywhere into a tableau of your koi pond. There’s only two rules while placing, it needs to connect, no starting a new pond. And it needs to not have fish next to fish or scoring next to scoring. Whomever has the most points wins.

But it’s also very pretty, like I said. The newest versions are cheaper and just have cardboard tiles in them. Those are still pretty. The more expensive version, which was the first one they put out, has acrylic tiles to it. And why that works so well is that they can put water on the bottom and then have the fish, dragonflies, lily pads or ripples in the water on the top. So it gives them this depth that looks like looking into very clear water.

Buy Kohaku

37. World Wonders

World Wonders is the other tile laying game, and one of the new games on the list. It again falls into that category of a pretty simple game in what you are doing on your turn. You are paying for a tile to place on your board. Their are restrictions, mainly that it needs to be next to a road or another tile where you can place them. And that’s about it, minus the wonders. The tiles push you up on some tracks, which you want to keep balanced, but it’s mainly about the wonders.

The wonders are all great wooden pieces that are screen printed to all look like different wonders. It’s really cool that way. And the wonders are the most likely way that you’ll get points. As you play out tiles you’ll fulfill requirements to be able to place a wonder. But you can’t just get the wonder. You need to spend the rest of your money to get it. So if you get it early, you might spend more money first before you snag that wonder. But you also don’t want to miss out on a wonder, because again it’s how you get points. It’s a very good system or push and pull that way.

Buy World Wonders

36. Via Magica

Next up is Via Magica, one that I learned about from the Dice Tower group. Though it’s not a favorite of all of them, I really enjoy this gamer’s bingo type of game. Someone is drawing chips from a bag that are all different types of animus that you all use to open gates. So one is drawn out and you can fill in one on one of your three games that matches the type. That’s simple.

It adds a bit to the game when you consider which gates to take. Some of them might make a resource wild for you, so you get more flexibility when opening gates. Or it might let you transfer some animus to a specific color on other cards giving you a head start. Plus they give you points, and you make decisions based on trying to get the most done, but also groups of colors. Because there are bonus points for the first person to get various color groups completed.

It’s a great simple game. The artwork is cute, and it’s one that would work well with most groups of people. Is it the most challenging game, certainly not, but Sometimes I want an easy and fun game to play, and Via Magica is very good for that.

Buy Via Magica

35. Sushi Go Party!

And now another bigger group game. I like Sushi Go Party a lot for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, I like drafting games and how they tend to be games with little to no downtime in them. The most downtime that Sushi Go Party has is when calculating the scores at the end of the round. Otherwise you’re drafting cards all at the same time.

The other thing that I really like about Sushi Go Party is the variability. There are a ton of cards that you can get for the game and that come in the main box, so you can mix it up how it works each time. And it allows you to customize it to who you’re playing with as well. I might want to play a really cut throat version some time, or maybe a more peaceful and zen version another time. With more cards, it can really be set-up for your game group.

Buy Sushi Go Party

34. Meadow

Now a game that looks peaceful, but it isn’t fully. Meadow has amazing artwork and it’s all about building out a tableau in front of you of nature. But the game is a very tight and thinky game with a core mechanism that really challenges you to think through as you play.

There’s a grid of creatures, terrains, and scenery in the middle of the table. And you have four tokens (five in a two player game) that you use to determine which card you get. But the token as a number one it, one through four, and that determines the distances from the spot you put the token and that is the card you get. So there is great strategy for when you grab something, even if you might need it later. Because it might be getting hard to be able to take.

This is one where I know even I take a bit on my turns. There is a lot to think about and that’s part of what is great about the game. It’s a real puzzle that is hidden in a box with very pretty artwork.

Buy Meadow

33. Flamecraft

And speaking of games with pretty artwork we have Flamecraft. Flamecraft is a resource gathering and contract fulfillment game. All of it with adorable artwork from Sandara Tang. But there is more to this game than just the pretty artwork and the fun artisan dragon theme.

In Flamecraft, you are collecting resources and fulfilling contracts. But the game does a lot of other fun things. Mainly as you gather resources you’re adding dragons to shops. So they become more powerful and can help you gather more resources faster. I think that’s an interesting challenge and twist of the game as you build up those shops.

Buy Flamecraft

32. Mansions of Madness: Second Edition

Now a game that has fallen a ways, Mansions of Madness: Second Edition. This one is mainly down here in the 30’s because I’ve played other games that I love, so a few games have moved down. But also because I haven’t played it recently, so it’ll go up if I get it played again before the next time I do my Top 100 Games.

But this is a Lovecraftian themed game in the Fantasy Flight Arkham Files line. This one has a bit more of a localized feel as you play through it. And the app helps with the game allowing it to add in interactive puzzles and change up the map each time you play so scenarios, while the story might not change, feel different.

And the game just does a lot in it. I mentioned the puzzles, but the stories are good. And because of the variety of tiles and monsters in the game, you can really get a wide variety of stories. Often times they take place in houses, but I’ve explored other areas, such as city streets and the shops on there. And it is a longer game, but because it’s cooperative and you all have that one goal, it works well. The immersion into the story and into the game certainly helps as well.

Buy Mansions of Madness

31. Super Fantasy Brawl

Finally, rounding out this section, we have Super Fantasy Brawl. Super Fantasy Brawl is an arena battling board game where you are trying to knock out your opponents characters for points, and complete objectives, for points. And it’s up to five points, so it’s a fast game. And I think it balances everything in the game really well.

I like the action selection system a lot. There are three action chips, each of a different color. You pick one card from each color to active on a turn. So you might be activating the same character multiple times, or it might get split up between characters. But you can also use them for defense. It just refreshes at the end of your turn, so that means that you’ll be missing an action on the offensive.

And I like how knocking someone out just means that they can come back in with a card play the next round. So I can’t knock out all your characters and just win that way. But you also can’t figure knocking characters out, because you need to do that to break up them getting a goal. A check for a goal is at the start of your turn, so your opponent always has a chance to stop it, which is a really good system.

Buy Super Fantasy Brawl

Upcoming Streams

Let’s run through the stream structure like I normally do. You might already know the schedule but in case you don’t. Wednesday at 8 PM Central I stream either a campaign game, or with this time of year it’s my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2023 Edition. And join me next Wednesday for games 30 through 21, so hitting the half way point. It goes so fast, and now I have so many games that I want to play.

Then on Monday I stream at 9 PM Central time. It’s generally a solo game. Though I’ll also do pack openings for things But normally it’s a solo game and a one off for the game like a roll and write, or sometimes a game like Under Falling Skies or For Northwood, which was on the list today.

But the best way, if you want to know when I go live or a new video goes up (it’s basically always live), please consider subscribing. You can do that here. And click that notification bell on the channel and you’ll always know when I go live.

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Top 10 – Dice Games https://nerdologists.com/2020/03/top-10-dice-games/ https://nerdologists.com/2020/03/top-10-dice-games/#respond Tue, 31 Mar 2020 13:26:50 +0000 http://nerdologists.com/?p=4236 Alright, the classic mechanic in board games, rolling some dice. Whether it’s Monopoly or Clue rolling dice to move, Risk where you roll dice to

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Alright, the classic mechanic in board games, rolling some dice. Whether it’s Monopoly or Clue rolling dice to move, Risk where you roll dice to attack, or Yahtzee where you roll dice to fill in a sheet, dice have been a staple of board gaming for a very long time.

When I am creating this list, I’m not just looking at games where it is mainly rolling dice, I’m looking at games where rolling those dice is a very important part of the game. So it’s not just going to be a bunch of roll and write games or older games, but a variety of games that rely on dice. I would guess that some people won’t consider the games to use the dice enough, but for me, it’s one of the major mechanics in the game, which is enough to get it onto the list.

10 – Sword and Sorcery
A good ameritrash game to take the #10 spot on the list, Sword and Sorcery has some story to it, but it’s all about crawling through the “dungeon” to advance the story, running across different monsters, fighting them and then going back and doing it all again. When you fight monsters, it’s about chucking dice. If you can gang up on them, you get get some automatic hits, or if you have the right items, you get more automatic hits, or if you aim, and maybe with all of that and a good roll you’ll be able to take a monster down in one hit. This game is about making you feel like a hero fighting through the dungeon and it might be a little bit easy. That said, the dice rolling is fun, especially with the extra symbols on the dice, not just hits or misses, because if you get the right combo, maybe you can boost your damage some more or ignore their armor. Of course, after your turn, you have to roll for the enemies and they might just hit you back hard and take you down as well. It’s a good straight forward dice chucking dungeon crawling game.

Image Source; Geek Alert

9 – Dead of Winter
I like the idea of games where the number of the dice matter, and not just in a simple comparison of does my number beat your number, if so, I win, like Risk. Dead of Winter gives you a lot to do with those dice. You can kill zombies, if you rolled high enough, you can search locations, if you rolled high enough, or you can barricade or do other things spending dice to keep the small group of survivors alive another day. There is no dice mitigation in this game, so that means that what you roll you get. Now, there are always things you can use the dice for, but it might not be what you really want. And while the dice roll is a random thing, it is one of the things that makes everyone look a little bit like a traitor, nothing that they can do about it, but it feels like a bad roll is somehow more likely to make a traitor. And that’s what Dead of Winter is about, it’s about fighting zombies, but it’s more about can you trust your fellow survivors, so are they out to get you?

8 – Village Attacks
Sometimes you just want to be a monster, and Village Attacks, you’re able to do that. You and your team of monsters are just resting in your castle most likely at the top of a cliff that somehow manages to keep the village below it in constant shadow when those pesky villagers decide to ruin your evening by attacking your castle with their pitchforks and torches. Can you fend them off? That’s what you use the dice for, they give you the ability to move, attack ranged, attack close and do other things, such as defend against the damage that might be coming your way. There’s less dice mitigation in this one, so you better hope that you roll well. But if you do roll three of the same symbol you are always able to reroll that until you don’t have it anymore. The theme is just fun, and while the game is a bit dark, I’ve found that it plays sillier because of the theme and the idea of these monsters just wanting some peace and quiet but the villagers keep bugging them.

Image Source: Board Game Geek

7 – Homebrewers
I love beer, so Homebrewers might be higher on my list than some, but it’s a fun small engine building game where the engine that you’re building is the beers that you are creating. You do that by getting ingredient cards and adding them to your different brews. But the dice play a major part in that, the dice you get have to clean up the mess you’ve made while brewing, get you ingredients, add in ingredients, get you grain for brewing, and brew your beer, so your one roll is very important. However, there’s good dice mitigation just in case you rolled almost all of a single symbol. You can trade dice with other players. Maybe I have two brew and no grain and you have no brew and two grain, we could swap a grain and a brew so that both of us are able to brew. But maybe I think you’re in the lead and you brewing will help you more than just doing a simple trade would help me, so instead, you can spend a dollar and change the face of a die. The game plays fast and feels almost like a filler type engine building game, but it’s a ton of fun and who wouldn’t want to drink a bacon nutmeg ale?

6 – Criss Cross
Smallest game on the list and only roll and write on the list. This game is very simple and very dice driven, you are putting down pairs of dice like they’re dominoes onto your sheet, as is everyone else. And you’re trying to get symbols next to each other so that you can score points in both rows and columns. It might seem like there’s an optimal solution that everyone would gravitate towards form the dice rolls, but you are free to put the pair of dice down on on your grid where ever you want, and you get to pick what symbol you want to put in a starting corner, since there are an odd number of squares. So the strategy for the game and plan for it diverges based off of whether or not you can match symbols next to each other at the start. Overall, the game is simple, it plays fast, but it’s a good little filler dice game that I like a lot.

Image Source: Shut Up and Sit Down

5 – Sagrada
Most of the games on the list, you’re rolling the dice and using them to resolve something. in Sagrada, you’re rolling the dice, then drafting dice, an using them to create a stained glass window. That by itself sounds like a lot of fun, but you have rules as to where you can an can’t place dice. You can’t have the same number or same color orthogonally adjacent to each other (left – right and up – down). Plus at the start of the game, you get to pick a stained glass window that you’re going to make. That is going to mean that you need certain colors in certain spots or certain numbers. So that locks in what you can pick even more so. Can you grab the right dice or get them to come out of the bag so that you can complete your stained glass window?

4 – Dice Throne Season 1/2
While this isn’t a pure dice game, it is one of the games that most heavily uses the dice. You’re rolling them every round, Yahtzee style, in order to hit your opponent and take down their health faster than they can take down yours. What’s interesting about it is that straights or four of a kind, that can mean a different sort of attack for each character. The Pyromancer might set someone on fire so that they are going to take more damage over time. The Shadow Thief might steal the CP (combat points) from another player and deal more damage because of that. And if you’re really lucky or can manipulate a roll so that you end up with all sixes, you can pull of a great ultimate attack. Then, assuming the damage can be defended against, the defending player rolls a single defense roll which might block damage, hit back for a little bit, or do something else, depending on the character. The game shines because of the cards, in some ways, though, because you can improve your attack or defense by playing down upgrade cards. So if you get a great combat upgrade, you might be able to swing for more or open up more options for what you can do on combat. It’s a really fun game and plays fast.

Image Source: Board Game Geek

3 – Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition
Mansions of Madness is one of those games where you use the dice to check everything. If you need to see if you know the lore of something and won’t be going more insane, look at your lore skill, grab that many dice and roll them. If you need to fight off a monster from the depths of the oceans, it’ll tell you look at your strength and roll that many dice. The only thing that you don’t use dice for is puzzles, as those are handled by the app or something so simple that anyone could do it. But Mansions of Madness uses the dice well and like a lot of the games in the Arkham line from Fantasy Flight, there are ways to mitigate the dice with rerolls, or you can spend clue tokens to turn clue rolls into successes. I think this is a good example of having just enough mitigation in the dice that it doesn’t feel so lucky, but you’re always hoping for that perfect roll and as you get later in the game and need better rolls with less resources, often, it adds to the pressure.

2 – T.I.M.E. Stories
For what is basically a complicate Choose Your Own Adventure with a bit of escape room thrown in, you get an interesting game with a lot of dice rolling. Some might argue it’s too much dice rolling as you test your skills to see if you can get enough agility to slip a key off the cooks belt or to fight off a crazed monster down in the tunnels. You never know what you’re going to run across that you’ll need to make a roll for. Now, the rolling, like I said, is not some people’s favorite piece to the game, it can be random and it can be quite swingy. So you might make it through a couple of tough encounters with ease and then an easy encounter might just wipe you out and cause you to restart a run. But for me, that’s some of the fun of the game, in the game you aren’t be swapped into the best vessels from that era or location, so you aren’t going to always be the perfect team. Plus there’s the time die which gives some variability to how much time you’re counting down and that can also cause you to have to go on another run. A controversial pick, but one that I enjoy.

Betrayal Characters
Image Source: IGN.com

1 – Betrayal At House on the Hill
So remember, when I do these Top 10’s, it’s going to include a lot of my favorite games, but dice rolling in Betrayal at House on the Hill tends to be somewhat important. I don’t think that it uses it best out of all the games on the list, but it’s my favorite. In it you’re using dice for combat, but more importantly for the haunt. The haunt is when the game shifts from being cooperative and turns into a fight for survival as one character becomes the betrayer and has their own winning objectives compared to the other players. This roll is known as the haunt roll and you’re trying to roll more than a certain number to keep it from happening. So a poor roll early in the game could cause the haunt to come on faster. While this can be an issue for some, I like that fact that ti’s not as standard a feel as a horror movie because you never know when the haunt is going to happen or if you’ll be prepared to win.

There are a whole lot more games where dice can play a big roll. I actually left Star Wars: Rebellion off the list, because I think that the expansion changes up combat some so that it’s not as luck and dice driven, but it does have a lot of dice in there as well. And you can see that even though some of my favorite games use dice, not all of them is it the highlight of the game. T.I.M.E. Stories is on the list because I don’t mind the dice, but I’m there for the story, whereas other games use the dice really well, like Dice Throne or Mansions of Madness where it’s so key to what you’re doing.

Let me know in the comments below what some of your favorite dice driven games (or at least games where the dice are very important) are. Are there any that you think I need to checkout? Looking at my shelf, I need to get Formula D to the table which has a lot of dice to roll as you race.

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Your Legacy Part 3 https://nerdologists.com/2017/07/your-legacy-part-3/ https://nerdologists.com/2017/07/your-legacy-part-3/#comments Tue, 18 Jul 2017 15:45:41 +0000 http://nerdologists.com/?p=1715 I have a few minutes today, so I decided to revisit making some more games legacy games. Here are a few more games that could

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I have a few minutes today, so I decided to revisit making some more games legacy games. Here are a few more games that could be fun as legacy games.

KrosMaster Arena/Quest

Image Source: Board Game Geek

Why it would work: You have super cute minis with unique powers, and you can get more gear and powers as you go along. That makes it fairly simple to build off of so that you can have a legacy aspect to the game. With these characters, there is already the feel of backstory for them, and you’d be able to play with that feeling and create stories going forward around them.

What I’d Change: Well, KrosMaster Arena itself isn’t that great an option, you’d have to go with KrostMaster Quest, which I have yet to play. In the Arena game you are picking teams and fighting and collecting things from the underworld. There is plenty of room for story in it, but the base mechanic of how to win the game would have to become more quest based, and with that then you throw on an overarching theme. You’d also need to adjust how much different things cost in the game because with the amount of gold that you can come across, it might be a bit much.

What I’d Keep: There characters themselves are worth keeping, and the style of them definitely. It’s kind of an anime type look and feel to them, so keep that going. Also, the variable character powers which are nice and balanced seems to work quite well, and the aesthetic of the world is great. You’d just have a different board set-up, probably modular for each game, as you’re either questing to find a certain treasure or defeat a certain villain. That would be awesome to be exploring, and then you trigger a legacy event to have to open up a box… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

What I’d Add: So, as I was saying, it would be awesome to be out questing for certain treasures or clues or things like that, and if you happen to hit the right clue or treasure, bam, you have to open a box and dropped onto the board in the middle of a game is a bad guy. Now your whole plan for the game is going to switch for this time. Now, I’m debating as to how I’d want this game to be played, I think it makes most sense as a cooperative game for 1, 2, or 4 players, where if it’s solo you control a team of 4 characters, otherwise 2 or 1 respectively. However, there is some potential for the game to be not coop simply because the characters are always knocked out, but balancing that out would be more difficult, and to have a good through story you’d want it to be cooperative. I’d also want to have different characters be the focus at different points in time, but I think that would be possible as well. And it would be cool to have beyond the four awesome minis that you’d start out with to be able to find other allies along the way, so much like the bad guy and finding something to have them show up, you could do that with allies as well that people could swap their characters out with.

Would I play it? Yeah, I think that I would, though I’d probably be waiting on reviews with this one. I like the base game of KrosMaster Arena well enough, however, I’d want to know that it didn’t fall into too much of a Seafall trap where it wasn’t laying out the story all that clearly as it went.

Mansions of Madness

Image Source: Board Game Geek

Why it would work: This game is based around solving mysteries, and the story that goes into those mysteries. It would be super simple to make it legacy, just put a large over arching mystery on it. Plus different characters with variable player powers and it’s cooperative, this game is really set-up to get a full legacy treatment if Fantasy Flight games ever wanted to. Plus, it would be pretty easy for them to continue to build upon it. You wouldn’t need to release a whole new game because you could reuse the tiles  so you’d mainly just be adding a few new minis and powers and a new story arc.

What I would change: There isn’t a ton that I would change. I love almost all the mechanics of the game, and the number of playable characters. You’d definitely be unlocking new characters as you go along, so you wouldn’t have your full compliment as you go. Also, you’d want to have a consistent house build that you don’t get in the 2nd Edition of Mansions of Madness now, but that is an easy change. Also, injuries and madness might need to be updated slightly. I love the idea of permanent effects for injuries or madness so if you go insane or get a wound, it would continue with you, but maybe change it from the really bad form where if you went mad again you’d die to if it persists to the  next game there is a lesser version of the madness that gets placed onto your character card, or lesser version of an injury. That way one person wouldn’t be at as much of a disadvantage.

What I’d Keep: Seems like a standard now, but variable player powers, and the mystery story aspect of this game definitely would get kept as well. I love the Lovecraftian theme on it and the style really makes it feel right, so I’d lean into that personally as well. I also like the modular board that you could use across seasons and stories and the smaller mysteries as well. There was some that I’d change about this game, but at the base, I’d keep the core mechanics.

What I’d AddFirst off, overarching plot to the game. When you find certain clues in the houses, they wouldn’t be relevant to your current case, but would be helping progress it over all. So you might not always be facing off against a large monster, some of the games might be investigating the house to find a clue, but of course the cultists and the deep ones that they’ve summoned are going to try and stop you. I’d also add the lesser or healing wounds or insanity so that a character doesn’t completely become unplayable. I’m thinking if I’d make the game easier or not, and I’m not sure that I would, I think maybe just a touch, but you should have a solid number of characters you start out playing as part of your massive detective agency. So don’t get too attached to your characters, because you’ll probably play a few through the story. Also, it would be great if you ran out of characters if you ended up having to open a special envelope that gives you a FBI agent or something like that, which starts out as more powerful, because you’d definitely be able to upgrade your characters as well. So maybe you can only hold a single item, but now you can do really well solving puzzles.

Would I Play this Game: I’d be the first person in line when this game came out. I can just imagine playing it in a dark room, some good mood lighting to give the correct feel for the game and then having the app playing music and telling you story pieces as you go along. It would be freaky fun if done right.

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TableTopTakes: Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition https://nerdologists.com/2017/07/tabletoptakes-mansions-of-madness-2nd-edition/ https://nerdologists.com/2017/07/tabletoptakes-mansions-of-madness-2nd-edition/#respond Fri, 14 Jul 2017 14:07:39 +0000 http://nerdologists.com/?p=1707 Back for more reviews on games that are a bit older, but I’ve finally gotten a chance to play them, and in the case of

The post TableTopTakes: Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition first appeared on Nerdologists.]]>
Back for more reviews on games that are a bit older, but I’ve finally gotten a chance to play them, and in the case of  Mansions of Madness, was totally worth the wait to check it out.  So spoilers, I’m going to review this pretty well.

Image Source: Fantasy Flight Games

Mansions of Madness is a story based game where you are investigators in a Lovecraftian world, trying to figure out different scenarios, solve puzzles, and search for clues. The investigators have been called to look into weird things that are going at on this mansions and exploring through the rooms, meeting the Butler, and trying to track down the cultists who are working on bringing through one of the elder gods. Things aren’t that easy though, and the monsters that show up and cultists that are running around are definitely trying to hurt you or drive you insane.

Image Source: Fantasy Flight

So, this game seems like there should be a ton of set-up that you need to do throughout the game. You are placing where the clue tokens are, you are setting up the rooms and there are monsters to be placed. That’s one of the cool features of the 2nd Edition of Mansions of Madness, it comes with an app.This app tells you what to set-up, where you need to set it up, and what you are seeing. You aren’t just placing a few clue tokens onto a board to investigate, you are getting a description that there is a family portrait on the wall, and that’s what you’re investigating, or the pile of mail that is sitting in the foyer, or maybe papers on the office desk.

There are other cool features to the app as well, it gives you story pieces, in fact it’s voice acted as you get the information for the case when you start. And it fills in the details as to what you find, so no flipping through a book, you just pick the clue you investigated (and it even tells you how to investigate it), you can then find the clue and information. It allows Mansions of Madness to feel like an RPG but without having someone run the game. And it allows them to do puzzles. Maybe you are very smart, then you can take more turns trying to figure out a puzzle, but they might be worse at combat. Finally, it makes the board different for you, we played the same scenario twice, and the board and clues came up differently.

Image Source: Board Game Geek

The app is definitely the big selling point to this game. There are other fun features as well. The fact that each character is unique and has a unique power is great. Along with that, it’s an annoying thing, but also a fun thing, when you get more wounds than you can take, you get a permanent wound, so you don’t die right away, but now instead of being able to hold a lot of items, now you can only hold two. The same thing happens with sanity, you are going more and more insane, and if you reach your insanity threshold then you go insane, and if you reach it again you die. But, like wounds, going insane means something, for example, when I went insane in the game that we barely won, I had to have a slashing weapon (I think that’s what it was called), and be in the same spot as the other player otherwise, I think the other player would have won, but I wouldn’t have. Now, what I was doing with that knife, never explained, but now I had to do weird stuff in order to be able to win.

Overall, this is a fun game and the app makes this game accessible to people who aren’t gamers. That said, I do think that this is more of a gamers game, and while it is cooperative, someone who is less of a gamer might just be doing what someone else says for them to do, versus playing the game as much themselves. However, and I think this is how it should be, if you are playing Mansions of Madness with someone who isn’t as much of a gamer, let them play, and it’s not super difficult to learn and once they do, they are going to enjoy it more.

Overall Grade: A

Gamer Grade: B+

Casual Grade: B-


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