Mansions of Madness

[a_cubed]

While visiting purplecat last year and this, $OFFSPRING and I enjoyed playing the Cthulhu Mythos game "Mansions of Madness" with her and B (and maybe G last year, too). We also enjoyed a game with $NEPHEW this year. Having discussed the possibility of a remote game with $NEPHEW and taken advice from purplecat I have bought a copy. The second edition of this game introduced a program to take on the role of the "Keeper" (aka dungeon master) which in the first edition meant someone had to run the game for the other players. The program now tells you what you can do and provides guidance on things like how the monsters move about the board, and keeps track of monster health. It also includes some fun puzzles. Nice for me is that it plays fine on the Steam linux program, which uses a Windows emulator under the hood to allow Windows-based games to play on linux. This game is one of those that works perfectly according to the database of game support. As it's not a heavy 3-d action game or anything, it's not that surprising, I suppose.

Looking forward to playing it with the family here. $WIFE likes Cthulhu Mythos so may be willing to play with us. We probably won't get to a remote game with $NEPHEW until the Christmas/New Year holidays, though, with the time zone issue making the timing awkward. The way we play (semi-role playing, heavy co-op discussion of actions) it was taking much longer than the suggested times. It will probably get faster as we become more familiar with the game, but even so, the time difference UK-Japan is long enough to make scheduling tricky, though not impossible.

Comments

[purplecat]

I hope you have fun with it. Ragnor, I believe, often plays solitaire with the app - which does mean he tends to become the fount-of-all-knowledge when playing. It definitely gets quicker though, on the whole, I'd say the estimated times are always on the optimistic side.

[a_cubed]

I'm sure we'll enjoy it. More so if I can persuade $WIFE to join us occasionally. $OFFSPRING was quite happy to hear that I'd got a copy and that the app seemed to be working well on Steam on Linux, so I don't need to worry about how to run the app. Haven7t actually tried to run the scenario yet, but the setup worked fine.

Thinking about getting some of the expansions already. I think we played one of the Paths of the Serpent scenarios last year and the other scenarios in that one look good. You noted some of them are out of print and rare/expensive, but any recommendations? Do you have the paid DLC ones? Those seem to be additional scenarios for the base game rather than needing any of the expansions.

[purplecat]

The fantastic journeys expansion is fun (that's the one with the train scenario we played) and, yes, the Temple of the Serpent Scenarios are good and vaguely hang together as a sequence. A lot of the other expansions blur together in my mind a bit. I think we have all the paid DLC - that's how we eneded up with the situation of there being one expansion we don't have, but we'd only be paying for it in order to get a couple of map tiles.

[a_cubed]

We played (all three of us) the first scenario today. We just lost. Interesting differences from the game of this scenario we played with $NEPHEW. I ended up insane, but just with "suspicion" which doesn't actually change my win condition. We just lost. I ended up, despite being he squishiest characer trying to be the meat shield for $OFFSPRING who had th occult evidence and needed to escape with it for us to win. But despite getting my best stat (agility: 5) as the negation for the monster attacks I didn't last the Mythos Phase and they were too far from the door to be able to make it out with the evidence.

Good fun, though. Definitely a bit quicker as $OFFSPRING and I knew the rules, even with having to translate some of the stuff for $WIFE so she properly followed the game.