First play of Mansions of Madness

This evening at Brians involved us playing a game of Mansions of Madness, a Call of Cthulhu based roleplaying board game. I was a little late turning up which meant I missed the game set up and character selection, although apparently game set up can be quite long, so possibly that was a blessing. Any how, when I arrived, the board pieces were set up for the scanrio that had been selected and everyone had chosen a character. I had been given a Professor character who was pretty good. Each character has a Sanity value as this game is based on not going mad whilst solving the scenario. Or dying either. Dying and/or going mad are pretty bad in this game. 


So the four characters started in the main entrance of the Mansion and we split into two groups of two and started to explore. Tom, the games owner was the game DM as such and controlled the bad guys whilst we stumbled about. The idea behind the game is that there are a number of clues that we have to discover, put into the right order and then solve the mystery. There are also locked doors and items to over come, basements to delve into, mysterious rooms and locations to examine. 


There is also a clever sub-game puzzle system; some rooms have a pile of cards to look through to turn over one at a time if we were to search the room - sometimes this would uncover a puzzle that would need to be completed before any more cards can be unturned. These little puzzles were great - they might involve sliding tiles around, rewiring a circuit etc to complete the puzzle. Depending on your characters intelligence depends on how many turns you got to complete the puzzle. Also there were items such as a locked cabinet that needed a key to open, but if you found an axe, like we did, you could bash it open! 


The DM as I thought of him had lots of creatures and Cultists (humans basically) to place on the board and attack the characters. Basically the night progressed by the two groups search around for clues and solving problems and taking out the occasional cultist and creature. Unfortunately each creature comes attached with it a Sanity check - every time we came across a creature we would have to roll a die and have a modifier attached which affects the die roll (the more hideous and scary the creature, the more likely you will fail the sanity check). If you fail the check, your character gains a token and if your limit is reached, you go Insane and can be affected by the DM - come under his control and/or do crazy things. 


After a while, it started to become clear the DM was up to something and we needed to get to the basement. But although we were making a path through the bad guys - Sanity checks and our healthy were taking their toll. Eventually we lost the game - partly down to me miscalculating a Rewiring Test and failing it. 


It was a good game, made better by the great artwork, fantastic miniatures, loads of counters and great mini games - unfortunately it has a really long play time; starting around 8:30, we finished very late. 

The Mansion laid out and the Investigators proceed inside

Hello Professor! Urk, my mind!