App Enhancement Request

By trgp, in Mansions of Madness

Is there a specific place to post enhancement requests?

I'd like to see something in the app that helps keep track of investigator turns. Since we can decide the order of everyone's turn every time we start a new investigator phase, it can be difficult to remember if everyone has taken their turn when there are more than a few players. We can do this on a piece of paper, but it would be nice to have it in the app.

You can always check the 'investigator log' in the menu whilst playing. That shows you all the interactions since the last mythos phase. Agreed it's not as detailed as tracking player turns though.

But it's a bit trickier since investigators can play in any order. You'd need to tell the app which investigator was going next, which interrupts the streamlined way it currently works.

There's not such a place, but you can send your suggestions to the media team (the mail can be found in the "contact us" section of this site).

In any case, we keep track of activation in a very simple way: we place one token (we use wooden cubes for a different game, but you can use everything you want) on the sheet of characters who are still inactivated for the round. When they activate, we move the token from the sheet to the table. At the end of the Investigator phase, we put the token back on the sheets.

In any case, investigators activation is something that won't probably ever be tracked with the app (I think the idea is to keep the app as simple as possible)

Agreed - turns are pretty short in the game, and I'd rather keep the app for just "stuff that we can't simply track with minis / tokens / cubes".

OK. I appreciate the responses and it certainly is easy enough to do by paper or tokens, but wasn't the app created to replace stuff that used to be tracked with tokens, etc in the first edition?

I think the app was primary created to replace the role of the 'keeper' in the first edition - to create a co-operative experience and to streamline gameplay. Which it certainly has done! And it's much more thematic not having the whole map 'revealed' to start with - unlike the first edition...

Kinda. The app works very well to proxy the role of the keeper. In the end, if you look at the app structure, it still asks you to place tokens on the board (and to remove them) and so on. It's a sort of "dungeon master" working in a passive way. This has some pros, of course (greater flexibility, and so on) and some cons (as you said, there's stuff you have to keep track of when it could be implemented in the app). As a rule of thumb, I think they wanted to reduce to the minimum the number of times you have to put info in the app to mantain an easy interface and a low playtime

For what it is worth Descent works this way and I find it harder to remember to tell the app on each hero activation. Particularly (as would be standard in MoM) if there are no monsters to activate, so you know there is nothing the app needs to do.

Funny enough, the last two people I demoed the game to had the same issue with remembering activations. Sometimes a bunch of longish narration just causes us to lose track. Particularly when the Mythos phase has little to no activity. I plan to make some two sided 3D printed "ready" tokens with an elder sign and clue face to track activations. But honestly, as Julia suggested any simple marker will do.

As for tracking turns in the App, I think FFG is trying hard to keep the game feeling like a board game and not a video game. Some people are already complaining that there is too much focus on the app, and players don't engage with the board enough.

We have been playing 2 players each with 2 investigators. To keep track of our actions we just have a chip for each investigator with green on one side and red on the other. Works great.

As for enhancements i would love to be able to change the color token of additional monsters. I am currently painting them and i want to paint them with every possible color. The cultist is easy, but with 2 and 4 of certain monsters I wont be able to do that. If i could reassign these tokens in the monster menu it would help me avoid this issue.

Edited by Vazzucious

I acctually like the idea of err404 's investigator action chips that he posted on Thingiverse . Of course this requires that you have access to a 3D printer.

Just turn your investigator card upside down (OR 'Tap' sideways) to show you have acted, then reset at start of turn