Mansions of Madness - In Stores Now. Hot

Is this just a Betrayal at the House on the Hill clone?

But then again Arkham Horror and BATHOTH together would make for an interesting combo.

I guess I just count myself as more cautious than usual before spending 80 bucks on a game, especially when some of the best games I own cost less than that.

In short, I'd buy it if people here said it was good.

This looks great to me.

I have high hopes for this one.
Corey Konieczka never dissapointed me in the past, unlike some other FFG designers.
I think he is at his peak now, with BSG and MEQ showing his brilliance to tie mechanics with theme.
It sounds indeed like a cross between BAHOTH and Arkham Horror. Given the fact I like both these games this
is high on my whislist for the end of the year. And those components look gorgeous.

I'm on this game like white on rice. It's gorgeous, it supports 2 players, and, based on Corey Konieczka's previous work, I expect there will be more to it than just monster bashing and that playing the Keeper will be at least as interesting as playing the Heroes.

This was developed after Betrayal went OOP, right? FFG may not have counted on Betrayal coming back into print so soon. Bad timing!

I'm still leaning toward the BAHOTH reprint because I don't expect it to be followed up by expansions.

Not that I'd have to buy the inevitable expansions to Mansions of Madness of course - unless the first one was a "fixit" expansion - but I know I will, I have a sickness.

This will appeal to a different crowd than Betray. Betrayal is way too simple for me, I find it rather boring, so boring I'm trying to flog my copy off. Since this is FFG I'm counting on this being more meaty and chromy.
Only thing putting me off is unpainted monster minis :(

Ah, so you are the guy FFG is writing those 40 page rulesbooks for.
I was beginning to worry if that guy actually excisted...

Yes. Unless a game is a filler "10 pages of rules!" is a turn off for me. (Of course a rulebook length doesn't always demonstrate how rules heavy a game is, but you get the drift.) The rules lightness of Castle Ravenloft is what has stopped me from grabbing that game. On the other hand hearing people complain that Earth Reborn seems too detailed has made me interested in it.
I don't play with kids, so I like to play games with some weight, detail and chrome. I'm not the only one, it just seems the Pappa players are very vocal here these days.

Skeletor, what do you mean when you say chrome?

shiny bits

I'm with you Skeletor.

Me too. Put some meat on them bones. I've got kid's games in the house--they're for the kids. I want something more substantial.

Yeah, Betrayal gets played either with kids or as a filler game. It's the kind of game you play for HA HAs at the end of the night when people are feeling a little brain dead. It's a very silly game.

I don't mind if the game is complex, as long as the complexity buys a lot of narrative, atmosphere, and detail. If it's just process and structure, then I don't want it. There's plenty of games that _need_ to be complex and meaty to support what it is they do. But when it's just mechanics for mechanic's sake...not good.

Of course, this kind of begs the question...if this is a story-driven game, how "heavy" does it need to be?

Mansion of Madness should not be very rules-heavy, because the Call of Cthulhu rpg isn't very rules-heavy. Too heavy, and players would find it easier to just play Call of Cthulhu.

it's just process and structure, then I don't want it.

Exactly. I'm really hoping this isn't another MEQ, where the bad guy just goes through a boring process of shuffling cards and chits around the board. After MEQ (a POS) and BSG (way too hit or miss), I don't think I'm nearly as excited to see Corey K's name on this as I would have been a year or so ago. StarCraft is still one sweet ass game though and I've yet to play RuneWars or the new Space Hulk card game (both look cool enough), so maybe he'll pull through.

It would be appreciated if it was heavy enough that the "Keeper" has interesting choices, and that the Heroes are playing against the "Keeper" not against just against the clockwork of the game. Personally, I'm hopeing/expecting something on par with Middle Earth Quest.

I'm with Skeletor, Sax and jeb; except for the painted minis. Blech

Since we're choosing up sides Civil War style :), I'm with Barnes and ufe.

The best games I've played in the past year have either been block wargames or crayon rail games. These games have rulebooks of about 8 pages, run 2-4 hours, and offer a wealth of narrative and strategy with few, and I mean few, components or procedures to upkeep.

The name is kind of hokey but I'm much more interested in this one than Betrayal. I feel like too much of a spectator in Betrayal.

Given that it's right in FFG's wheelhouse doesn't hurt any either.

S.

That's true. I am looking more forward to tying this than the new Betrayal. I hope FFGs timeframe of 2-3 hours is pretty accurate. I want to like AH and BaHotH, but for different reasons, they never clicked with me.

Hopefully this contain be the best of both.

*Hopefully this contains the best of both.

Mansions of Madness just turned into an auto-buy for me. The map tiles appear to be compatible with The Hills Rise Wild, especially the graveyard one which is almost exactly what I envisioned for the unpublished Re-Animator expansion. So even if I don't like Mansions of Madness, I will still make good use of the components.

I don't think I'm nearly as excited to see Corey K's name on this as I would have been a year or so ago.

I still think Corey K. is one of the best designers working in games today, period. That being said, and this may sound weird, but I'd love to see what he would do at another company. I'd really like to see what Corey K. would design "off the payroll" so to speak. But I'm interested to see what he does with this genre, regardless of where he's working.

I _never_ was interested in Ameritrash for ultra-complex, fidgety games. If I want that, I can go to ROADS AND BOATS or ASL. The best AT games to me have ALWAYS been the lower complexity ones that put the player front and center, not the rulebook. I like complex games, but I've got about ten really heavy, ultra complex games and I'm not sure I really need more. It's got to be a really, really damn good one for me to reach for it over TI3, HERE I STAND, MAGIC REALM, or other games that have weight like that.

Think about DUNE. DUNE doesn't really have a lot of rules. It doesn't need the 40 page rulebook to tell its story, because the players tell its story. And it's really terrifyingly complex in terms of situational gameplay and interaction...but it doesn't need pages and pages of rules, exceptions, variations, multi-phased turns, rigid structures, or anything of that nature. COSMIC ENCOUNTER likewise.

As for MANSIONS OF MADNESS, I'm not really sure that in this kind of game I value "interesting choices" over the narrative or emergent gameplay. I don't really think heavily story-driven games are appropriate for hardcore strategy play- if you look at the best games of this class, they tend to have very few rules. ARKHAM HORROR would be the exception, but it doesn't get complex until you start bringing in the expansions. Then it's kind of a mess.

To me, going into this title looking for depth and weight is kind of like getting ASL and expecting it to be light and fluffy, good for kids...it isn't the right venue. But who knows, maybe this will be some kind of super deep strategy game...

I think that he creates some of the most novel mechanics, many of which are really cool (the whole card pool in MEQ for instance). However, I also think that he makes many design decisions that are just used to artificially balance a game...so it creates tension through the rules instead of through the theme (if that makes sense....Matt's review of Space Hulk: The Card Game hits on this).

Since Starcraft (perhaps BSG....I give that a pass, our group has struggled with it as of late, but it could be something idiosyncratic with us), I think that the designs are shifting from being balanced by thematic considerations to more "rule-balance" considerations. MEQ doesn't really have the staying power that I was hoping for....this could be fixed with a small exspansion to clean up some of the weak points. Runewars had another great idea with the action system, but there was a lot of the game that didn't fit together as well (the fate deck, the lack of integration of the heroes).

So, I see a lot of brillianc in some of the details, but a little bit of a lack of vision in how it all goes together.

The sample cards posted at BGG are surprising. They appear to be almost completely flavor text. This can be both good and bad. Good, in the sense that there will be a strong sense of theme, assuming these cards fit into a story context or at least the appearance of a story, like in Arkham Horror or Android. Bad, in that the replay value may be diminished when experience players quickly recognize and tune out a familiar paragraph of flavor text. The numbers in the upper left corner might be scenario numbers, and then maybe the Keeper-type player will be choosing between alternate cards as the scenario progresses.

I'd agree with that completely, SG- if anything, Corey K. needs an editor. Matt's DEATH ANGEL review sounds like it bears this out somewhat (and really, this discussion should probably go there.

Which he's not going to get at FFG, where "more is better", and I think that's unfortunate because if you could shave out some of mechanical clutter in RUNEWARS, for example, you'd have a handful of amazing mechanics in a much more cohesive package. As it stands, there's these great pieces mixed in with WAY too many other pieces of varying quality. The result is sprawl, and great design in _any_ creative medium is just as much about what you choose to leave out as what you choose to put in. Right now, his designs are erring on the "put in" side- and I think that's a function of the FFG house style more than anything.

I also agree with the balance issue...when you can hear the gears grinding in the name of balance, it's every bit as bad (if not worse) than a lack of balance.

Other than BSG, I have yet to be impressed by any of Corey's games. To me he symbolizes exactly what people complain about today about FFG: lots of clever mechanics, game-y just for the sake of adding more choices and strategy. Fun to read his rulebooks to see his latest conglomeration of a bunch of game ideas, but where's the STRUCTURE to the game? (The games I'm thinking of here are Starcraft, Middle-Earth Quest, and Runewars) Though didn't he have a hand in Tide of Iron - to me that's one of the FFG games that is least cluttered up by cleverness. Everything makes sense; I think it's easily the most streamlined FFG big box game.

I guess I feel like Starcraft is where that whole trend started; as cluttered as Descent might seem, other than the clever dice there's not a single clever mechanic in the whole thing, it's a ridiculously easy game to explain. The complexity in there is only in the number of monsters, special abilities, etc. As MattDP has said sometimes, TI3 is almost the same way, halfway through reading the rules you know how the rest are going to read. That's not true about Starcraft, with its unintuitive-just-for-the-sake-of-adding-more-game order system, for example.

I don't see why it's not possible to have both, as well as reasonable depth, without an overwhelming rules book. Fury of Dracula does it pretty damn well, without the person playing Dracula being reduced to being simply the person rolling for the monsters.

I don't know Uba, that rulebook is 30+ pages....starting to get out of the spartan comfort zone.

Dragonstout, I might actually agree with you about STARCRAFT being "where it all began", regardless of how much I really love that game. It's complex, unintuitive, and packed with mechanics. However, I think it works, and it's right for the scope and scale of the game. It's also incredibly innovative, daring, and unlike anything else before it. But I do see where you're coming from in terms of certain trends originating from there. Which is really ironic, because I've always been under the impression that STARCRAFT was one of FFG's _least_ successful games, both commercially and in the eyes of the public.

That's also a good point about TI3- the rules hang together, regardless of their relative complexity. It's not a complicated game. There's a lot of content, but the flow and process is easy to grasp.

I like that Corey's designs take risks though, I like that they have an experimental feel. Part of having that sense of experimentation is that some things aren't going to work- and I can respect that. It's like the Clash's "Sandinista"- there's really one _amazing_ record out of three LP's worth of music. There's one that's OK but kind of goofy, and then there's one that's not very good at all. But together, they are "Sandinista", and it really wouldn't be the same record if it weren't part of the same package. To me, that's when a creator is at their most interesting, when they're willing to risk failure and try things out.

But still, I think it comes down to Corey needing an editor, someone to say "leave this out for another game".

I don't see why it's not possible to have both, as well as reasonable depth, without an overwhelming rules book. Fury of Dracula does it pretty damn well, without the person playing Dracula being reduced to being simply the person rolling for the monsters.

I'm certainly open to the possibility, and I'd love to see it work in this game as it does in FoD. I'm just a little gun shy after the other games that FFG has released this year. Their games have become so mechanics-driven.

Skeletor, what do you mean when you say chrome?
September 20, 2010
Canttakethisanymore said:
...
shiny bits

I thought chrome referred to extra rules to make the game more thematic. No?

I'm not opposed to innovative mechanics, but the mechanics should support the theme without interrupting the flow of the game.

Wow...isn't it funny we're talking like that about Ameritrash games now? Cyclical, indeed.

For the last five months I have only been writing one sentence comments to oppose the ensnobbishment of Ameritrash.

Michael, it's a bit creepy.
I just wrote this article that is pending publication over here that tries to look at why Dune and Cosmic Encounter work as timeless games and other don't.
It's all about "open architecture" for me. A designer trusting the game to the players, so that they can fill in the blanks, making some room in the rules for creative play. And that is exactly what many of the recent FFG game shave been missing.

“Skeletor, what do you mean when you say chrome?”

Chrome is additional rules in games which aren’t needed but are placed there for theme and flavour. An example is biting hunters in Fury of Dracula.

“The best games I've played in the past year have either been block wargames or crayon rail games. These games have rulebooks of about 8 pages, run 2-4 hours, and offer a wealth of narrative and strategy with few, and I mean few, components or procedures to upkeep. “

8 physical pages maybe, but they are not rule light games. It’s just that those companies write brief and dense rulebooks. That’s why I put the clause “(Of course a rulebook length doesn't always demonstrate how rules heavy a game is, but you get the drift.)” – these were the exact games I was thinking of. Hammer of the Scotts is 8 pages, but has far more rules than Dungeon Quest or Ravenloft which has more pages.

FFG does seem to go all out in minimizing the rules questions. Hell, Dungeonquest had an example for everything in it...used to be that kind of thing was just written. There is a lot of noise in education that they way that students learn is changing from written text to a mish-mash of text and pictures (I don't know that I buy into that yet), but that approach definitely seems to drive the FFG rulebooks.

That's interesting, thanks for clearing that up for me.

I love chrome too (sabotage runs in TI3 are funny and cool, though largely useless) just that sometimes they really are a lot to remember.

Corey K's designs feel euro-ish to me, there's balance for the sake of balance, sometimes at the cost of theme. This is very apparent in MEQ, where Sauron is largely playing a eurogame and in the strategy card selection of Runewars, it feels like there's an optimum move all the time, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

On a separate note, I was checking out Corey K's list of games, and apparently he and CTP are working on Reins of Power. I hope that comes out soon. Maybe next year will be the year.

Isn't Reins of Power like the Duke Nukem of games - i.e. vaporware? They've been working on it for a long time, kind of like the Dune re-theme.

Well that's going to bum out a lot of people who were hoping for this for Christmas. :(

I'm having deja vu.

This game looks fun but, I can wait to play it.

Now shipping! Yes! We'll definitely have it in time for ConnCon, then.

Nice to know that people take some notice - and remember - some of what I've written!

But yeah, one of criticisms of Death Angel was that some of the mechanics felt like they had no business being in the game other than as levers to create tension - in particular the prohibition against taking the same action twice in a row. I didn't specifically mention theme but now I come to think of it, Space Ghost is right. The original Space Hulk doesn't need artificial mechanics like that because the setting, narrative and pace of the game - as well as properly thematic mechanics - create tension all by themselves.

I found this discussion interesting because it's finally clarified for me what, exactly, some people's beef with recent FFG releases is. It's one thing to say a game is "bloated", quite another to clarify it. I'm not entirely sure I agree this has been the case with a lot of recent FFG games but it's certainly true that all thematic games walk a fine line between adding strategically interesting rules that are necessary for the theme and adding strategically interesting rules for the sake of providing interest. It's not always easy to tell one from the other. This is just as true for the ultimate "thematic" games - consims - as it is for Ameritrash and in that genre probably represents the dividing line between lighter "mass market" wargames and proper Grognards.

FFG games aren't really all that bloated. Horus Heresy would be the bad one. Runewars, for all of Barnes' whining has exactly the right number of rules, and everything is tied together by a solid structure. (The exception is the Adventure tokens, which are...ok, but are presented as optional rules. )

FFG rulebooks are wonderful, however. What bulks them up is full-page illustrated examples which are wonderful, and the pages of component descriptions. They are also actually teach the game as opposed to just being a reference.

(Warhammer 3rd is an exception. That first boxed set needed more editing. Forgetting to actually state the difficulty of magic tests is just criminal.)

MattDP wrote...

I dunno, I think Death Angel is a pretty lean game. That's actually what I like best about it. It packs a lot of theme and detail into a very affordable package. It's not QUITE up to the detail of the original game, so I don't think it's quite as good. Really though, they occupy totally different niches, even though they have the exact same theme.

My wife recently told me that she had the realization that a lot of "big" games are too much to deal with for the payoff she gets. She was referring in particular to Arkham Horror and Fury of Dracula (she loves BSG, but partially because she liked the show a lot). I love both games, but I do see what she's saying. There comes a point when all of the overhead of the game is just too much trouble for the enjoyment the game provides. I think that FFG has pretty much decided that such a curve must not exist. I think that Arkham Horror works well because that detail serves the immersion of the game, but it really worked against Middle-Earth Quest, I thought. That was a game with a lot of rules, so the guy who knew the game best (i.e. me) always got stuck playing Sauron, and you were STILL answering endless rule questions.

It's nothing to do with being "lean". It's to do with adding rules that are counter-thematic for no purpose other than to create strategy. Why, as I asked in my original review, can these highly-trained, near-superhuman warriors with ultra high-tech weaponry not lay down a continuous curtain for fire, or indeed move around without taking frequent rest breaks? Why can the grunt marine paired with the librarian continue to use psychic powers after the librarian is dead? It ruins the thematic immersion for no better reason than the designer couldn't think of a thematic way to create similar choices elsewhere in the game.

Yes, it's all about what you get out of the game. BSG is an interesting case in point because I've long felt that the *entire* entertainment value of the game comes from trying to guess who the Cylons are (or staying hidden if you're a Cylon). Everything else - the skill checks, the jumps, the win conditions, the fleet combat, everything - exists just to support that basic premise. Yet I can see no real way that you can carry on playing the bluff and guessing part of the game without all the extraneous crap. It's a bit like Junta really, with the coups, only better.

Ahh, I see what you're saying. I guess those little thematic issues never really bothered me much, because the game always felt very true to the spirit of Space Hulk. More of an overall feel than specific details.

I played a really good game of BSG last week with elements from both expansions, and it totally reinforced that idea of the metagame being the most interesting part. The mechanics are good, but they are mostly good in the way they support the metagame. If someone won't play that part of the design, the game kind of falls apart.

The real advantage of the restricted action choice in Death Angel isn't game balance, it's pacing. Most turns, each combat team will only have a choice between two actions. (Sometimes a given combat team won't even get a choice, due to an event card.) So action selection doesn't get bogged down in an overly complex discussion, and the game moves along at a brisk pace. Add in the nearly constant action and the occasional space marine death, and you get a game that is pretty exciting.

Reading the MoM rules gets me all hot and bothered. In a good way.

Woo Hoo! UPS tracking says my copy should be delivered tomorrow evening.

I picked up Mansions today. It's a big, heavy box, like an Arkham Horror big box only 50% taller and heavier. The contents are gorgeous, and the unpainted minis have lovely sculpts. I am just beginning to read through the rules, but it looks good so far. If turnout for my Call of Cthulhu group is light on Saturday, we're playing this instead. Even if turnout is okay, I will cut the session short so we can play a game of Mansions. If most of my players show up, then no Mansions. Too bad that it doesn't scale up past 5 players.

This has been my beef with a few of Corey's games, that there are rules added for strategic interest instead of for thematic reasons: specifically I'm thinking of Starcraft and its entire reverse order system and Middle-Earth Quest, which is really more a complicated strategy game than an adventure game, here. When I saw the rules for Earth Reborn, its order tile system looked like just another case of adding a weird system for strategic interest rather than thematic reasons, but it seems to really work out and not feel counterintuitive.

BSG and Runewars I think mostly don't have this problem. Even Runewars' weird numbered order cards make a certain sense in terms of certain actions being better at certain times of the year.