Mansion of Madness

Number of Players: 2-5 players
Age: 13+
Prep time: 45 minutes
Playtime: 90+ minutes

Mansion of Madness is a scenario lead game of occult horror (think L.P. Lovecraft).  This is a cooperative game investigators (up to 4) against the keeper.  

There are lots of pieces to this game when the box is first open, two instruction booklets that have a lot written in them.  Do not let this put you off.  I spent a good week or two (plus numerous youtube videos) to work out how to play this game.   With all the research I did I became dubious about how much I was going to enjoy this game.  I did run two practice runs with friends to really get my head around all the rules.  Once I was confident with the rules, I decided what scenario I was going to run.

I set up some of the cards at home so the set up for the group was decreased.  Each scenario has different tiles that make up the play area (there will be a house, garden and sometimes underground terrain), each person takes an investigator collecting their starting equipment.  They have to walk around and find the clues that help them to complete the story which has been revealed at the beginning of the game.  The Keeper is the only person who knows the conditions for which the investigators or keeper wins.  As the game continues it is possible for the investigators to discover this.

The keeper is trying to kill/stop the investigators from completing the task.  This is done through power cards that they can play, summoning monsters or creating traps and other nasty things that makes the tasks of the investigators a lot harder.

Many times through out the game, for the investigators to discover the clues they must over come an obstacle or a threat.  This can be a fight, a puzzle or some other dastardly event that the fates decide.  

Although there is a lot of learning, and a lot of preparation required for this game.  The actual game play is brilliant.  There can be a lot of story telling and RPG if the group require, to watch the investigators get scared as they see monsters appear more and more and wondering what the keeper is going to do next makes the playing the keeper brilliant.

Score 7/10 (giving a 7 because there is a lot of hard work to learn the game) once you've learnt the game, I'd turn it into a 9.

Dawn

This is the first video of a series to help teach how to play Mansion of Madness