Last night we played Return of the Reanimator for the first time. I thought I’d just give a quick overview of how the game played out, the good, the bad and the ugly.

First of all let me say that this scenario overall is great, a million times better than lost in time and space. However, there are a few problems especially with the end game. I have offered a few simple fixes which I think will work.

Return of the Reanimator involves zombies, lots of zombies, endless waves of zombies. The game actually “feels” like a zombie movie. It doesn’t matter what you do, they keep coming back time after time. It took the group a good few rounds before they realised that their best chance of survival was to just run and slow them down from range, but this simply added to theme.

Crawling hands are a new element to the game. Every time a corpse marker is placed, 2 crawling hand tokens are placed. The keeper then can spend threat to move the hands or if an investigator is their space, stun them. Although this pretty fun to do, especially when the investigators have the horde close on their heels, I found that most of my threat was being spent on placing corpse markers, raising zombies, mythos cards and movements. Their certainly a nice little addition, I personally found my threat could be used in more wicked ways elsewhere.

So the investigators run round a dingy zombie infested medical school solving clues in attempt to track down Herbert West. Good times. But it wouldn’t be Mansions of Madness if there wasn’t and handful of problems with the end game.

Right, in my humble opinion, this is how ALL of the games of MoM should play out. If you are rubbish bunch of investigators and the timer runs out, you lose. Investigate better. If you read the clue wrong and spent half the game going in the complete wrong direction you should not be in a better position to win the game. End of story. In contrast, if you're a pack of Columbos then you should be rewarded for your speedy clue finding skills and be in better position to win the game, certainly not a worse.

Objective 1A states that the investigators win if the named maniac, Herbert West, escapes via the graveyard. Herbert West won’t appear on the board until event 4 is revealed so regardless of how well or poorly the investigators play they’ve got the same chance of winning or losing. Even if they found every clue as fast as possible they still need to wait for him to appear. Rubbish.

Problem with Objective 1C. Investigators win if they escape via the graveyard. So regardless if they find a single clue all they need to do is escape. If they are running behind schedule and find themselves in the graveyard when the objective is revealed via event 4 then they’ll win. They’ll win through being bad investigators. What the hell?

Not only are these 2 objectives weak they’re also thematically senseless. I’ve come up with 2 very simple fixes for these objectives which I will test with my second game group next week.

Objective 1A: If clue 1 is found reveal Herbert west. If the investigators kill Herbert west they win the game. If the timer runs out, they lose. This means that the faster the investigators solve the clues the more time they have to kill West. Keepers objective will be to slow them down, which in this scenario with the horde of zombies is a lot of fun.

Objective 1C: If clue 1 is found then the investigators find incriminating evidence (use a random card) and must escape via the gaveyard with this item. The better the investigators do, the more time they have to escape. Keeper will be again working round the clock to stop them.

In the first objective you’re trying to find where West is hiding so you can find and kill him. In the second you’re trying to escape with evidence. These are very simple changes to the objectives which I believe will make the scenario a lot better.

Overall, the game is great. We had a lot fun. It really feels like a zombie movie. The ending let’s it down a bit but this is easily fixed in my opinion.