In this new edition, you need only lay out a couple of tiles, and tokens to indicate items of interest. In the first edition, the entire house was laid out in advance, and cards placed face down in them to indicate challenges and items to be found. It manages the scenarios, and handles the monsters so that all players can now work together.
#MANSIONS OF MADNESS SECOND EDITION RULES PC#
The role of the keeper is now managed by an easy-to-use app that can be run on iOS, Android, PC and Mac. Mansions of Madness: Second Edition has addressed every flaw of the original and the result is one of my favourite board gaming experiences of all time. White eye tokens indicate nightlines that can be revealed to expose new tiles. Yellow question mark tokens indicate an item to search. Red lamp tokens indicate a room to be discovered. It was, for me, the classic example of a game that could have been great, but missed. We loved what MoM could have been, but we wound up not playing it very often as a result of these drawbacks. This resulted in a massive mail out by Fantasy Flight to rectify, and the game soon shifted to small scenario expansion packs which were better tested, but still left the issue of complicated setup and dull play for the Keeper intact. The game required an errata to play out of the box, and one subsequent expansion was so ill tested, with components misprinted, as to render 3 of the 5 included scenarios moot. The Keeper’s role was a thankless one, and not particularly engaging to play, as you managed setup and the monsters that tried to prevent the investigators from winning, but your strategy was pretty much automated.
It also set one player in the role of Keeper, while the other players played the investigators. Setup was time consuming and easy to mess up in ways that rendered the game unplayable once discovered. It was a great game hampered by technical issues. Mansions of Madness: First Edition was the most infamous victim of FF’s tendency to rush games and expansions to market with insufficient play testing. Mansions of Madness is a mystery and exploration game in which 1-5 players co-operate to complete and survive a paranormal investigation and/or save the world from the Horrors Without.
So, I should preface this review by saying that as fan of this line-well, this is another-I’m predisposed to like it. We play Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Files line of games at our house with a regularity that normal people might find disturbing. This Mansions of Madness: Second Edition review is a guest review by Ryan States of Laird Ryan States.