So I love Arkham Horror. My fiance has expressed interest in Mansions of Madness and I'm interested in Elder Sign and Eldrich Horror. Can someone who has experience any of them give me a recommendation on which games to look into and how they're different?

Uhm. You asked no easy question here. Many would love this game over the other, and all games are huge enough that pages and pages can be written to answer this query.

I'll try to stay short:

- Elder Sign : it's shorter than Arkham Horror and deploys a dice mechanic. Hence, even if planning and strategy could have a major role, if you have bad luck with dice, you lose the game. I think the game is always fun, but I can see many throwing the dice out of the window for similar reasons. The core set is on the easy side, tho; the coming Gates of Arkham will make the game considerably harder

- Eldritch Horror : it's on a wider scale than Arkham Horror. The games look similar, but they are not. Eldritch is a solid game, but it's totally unforgiving: you don't know what to do, and the board will use you to wipe the floor. Difficulty can be staged, tho, not only by playing against certain AOs before than others, but also because you can vary the Mythos deck composition according to your needs. Core set is skinny on cards: you need Forsaken Lore to have a richer game and avoid cycling the same encounters at every game. Still, Forsaken Lore in my opinion is not a great expansion: it adds too much variety to the game, making it imprevedible. And this means luck could have a certain incidence.

- Mansions of Madness : it's the only one that is not fully coop; if you play with your fiancé, one is the Keeper, the other plays as the investigators. If the keeper pushes to win, investigators lose. Period. So, you need to check whether this is ok for you or not, and in case, if you're able to play not for the victory but just to tell a story. Additionally, some mechanics are extremely delicate and sometimes they don't work at all (if you do not respect the timing the designers had in mind, you can end up revealing clues disclosing secrets you already now). In my opinion, of the four games you're interested in, this one is the worst. Plus, it has quite a limited replayability. Every adventure comes with three possible endings, and a different starting disposition of items, but in the end, you can go through all of them quickly.

Hope this helps

JULIA

It does. Thanks!