Can we talk about games you shouldn't play?
Fantasy Flight's Mansion of Madness. Hell, if you know Fantasy Flight at all, you know there's a 50% chance their product is both great and deeply flawed, or just flawed. MoM is just flawed.
Basically, one player has to be a DM and spend actual time creating a level for the players based on one of the scenarios. This isn't a 5 minute setup like Heroquest. I think even Descent takes less time to get set up. In MoM, the GM has to decide where the objective is. Then they have to lay cards under each of the rooms, which are items and the keys/plot elements necessary to do the final objective. It's a system where you get presented a lot of binary options and you have to pick one of them in a way that makes the overall objective beatable.
Meanwhile the GM gets to spawn monsters who are completely unlimited, to continually harrass and harry the players as they go through the mansion. Great.
So our game of it starts. We start wandering. It's pretty typical boardgame fair. And then the GM's wife walks into the kitchen, opens the fridge and ends the game. No, really. That's one of the big hooks of the game, there are instant fail states based on rooms you explore. She happened to open the fridge which was a dimensional portal to the Ice World of Ithaqua, who comes barreling out into reality to kill us all. That was one of the first rooms on our path through the house.
The GM decides to mulligan that, because the game had literally not been underway more than 5 minutes. So we play on. And what becomes immediately clear is that, only one person is even remotely close to going the right way. Since no one knows what room to go to, and what rooms to return to later, everyone is wandering around exploring looking for items. And that's when the monsters come into play. They can be put in any room in the house where there's players, and if they're not killed, they stay there, constantly attacking players and preventing them from going anywhere. Be fortunate enough to beat one, (and maybe this was just this particular kind of monster), they go back into the GMs pool to be reused again next round.
The flow of gameplay basically goes like this:
-Players explore a couple rooms, maybe finding a key item, maybe some other items, or ending the game entirely.
-Players roughly figure out where the places they need to be are by process of elimination. But they don't know WHAT they need to do.
-Players fan out over the house becoming isolated. The game may end at any time as they explore.
-Monsters show up, slowing down most players to the point of locking them in place.
-One or two players acquire the objective item and start trying to go to the places they need to go.
-Monsters swarm the objective holders, preventing them from going anywhere.
-Other players, now free, start moving through the house to support the objective holders.
-The GM splits their monsters forces up, slowing everyone down and adding another 10 turns to the inevitable conclusion that players get where they need to go and the game ends.
The problem with MoM is that it's highly deterministic in what will happen, and the only surprises are an immediate end to the game. Just like Arkham Horror, there's a lot of narrative to things that is cool. But as a game it's not fun in the least.
Author
Topic: Boardgames you love, boardgames you hate. Open boardgame discussion. (Read 6519 times)