Hello all,

This weekend sees one of the largest gaming convensions in South Africa, Icon 2013, in Johannesburg. While I was there earlier today, there were a group of people discussing Arkham Horror (AH) and Mansions of Madness (MoM). Based on the discissions I deduced that the majority of the poeple found AH a far better game than MoM. Is this true? I have never played MoM, and therefore cannot compare the two.

Is MoM a good/enjoyable game? How does it rate compared to AH? What makes it different/better/not-as-good-as AH?

Yours thankfully

GM

MoM is a very indepth game that tries to recapture the invesigative portion of LOvecraft and Call of Cthulhu. It's a very slow game and not nearly as action oriented. It also is not a co-op game like AH. All the players play against the Game Master/Keeper/Whatever.

It looks like fun but you really have to be ready for the long haul before you pick it up. It's like--if AH is the 'Risk' of Lovecraft boardgames, then MoM is the Monopoly.

Honestly, MoM is terrible.

The game has some cool ideas in it, and graphics and minis are cool, but games are absurd. First of all, they are loooong (5 hours? 6 hours sometimes?), if the Keeper plays aggressively, there is no way he can lose a game, unless some incredible luck is on the investigators side. The mechanisms of the games simply don't work: you have a fixed amount of turns to find out something. If the investigators are late for some reasons, some events could happen without them being able to understand what's going on because they never find the clues. Sometimes clues show something that already happened. Some scenes are grotesque (somebody running through the house shouting "don't open the fridge", and the fridge results in being a portal able to kill an investigator). Fight is card driven, but cards tend to repeat themselves very soon, and additionally they could create the most incredible situations ever: I had Michael McGlen using his tommy gun like a baseball bat several times in the same scenario (seriously, a gangster with a point blank witch doesn't know how to shoot?), Sister Mary spending rounds doing some serious lesbian stuff with the same witch Michael tried to tommy gun to death, monsters appearing and disappearing from the same room just to cause investigator losing Sanity (yeah, every time you see the same freaking monster you have to roll. So the monster enters your room just to exit from it at the end of its movement: Horror check. In the following round you follow the monster: new horror check, which is demented. Scenarios are often badly worded, poorly playtested and without the minimum balance.

Additionally, there is this incredible rule: the game is structured over a series N of events with a time trigger. When even N-1 is triggered, you reveal the Objective card, saying what each part has to do in order to win the game. And this regardless of the number of clues you've found. So, for instance, investigators have found Clue 5, 4 and 3 when event N-1 is triggered. This forces the Keeper to reveal the Objective, and players discover that investigators need to escape from the entrance to win the game (let's say to go to the police and tell what's going on). But how they can win if they DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON BECAUSE CLUE 1 WAS NOT FOUND? Additionally, for such scenarios, they could simply enter the house, squat on the entrance for the needed amount of time and win the game. It's really stupid.

I tried to really like the game, and I played something like 30 games over the last two years. No way. Sorry. The only thing that happened to me, my husband, and the friends playing with us was that we all decided to resurrect the old Chaosium Call of Cthulhu RPG to play some games. And that was a blast.

Really, avoid this game. The only way you could like the game is if you roleplay lightly the stuff: the Keeper doesn't play for winning, but just to tell a story, and allows investigator to explore and move and so on. But then, if you want the roleplay, go for a roleplay, and not for a boardgame

I do have agree with JUlia on that point. While I've never played MoM I know that it sounds like a watered-down version of Call of Cthulhu. Just play that, because then, if you WANT your nun to have 'relations' with someone, it's on your terms and who you want her to have that relationship with.

I personally might pick up the basic MoM simply for the sake of having it--I'm a collector of all things Cthulhu and Lovecraft and having a board game is cake. Still, Strange Eons does have a beta-test thing for making MoM stuff.

...and for those of you who are interested, Chaosium had an incredibly successful KS campaign for the 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu. While I didn't play Call of Cthulhu years ago, I definitely backed this project.

Faust, have you considered Call of Cthulhu - LCG? That one is a totally terrific game!

I think the base game of MoM should have been structured like its expansion Call of the Wild since the beginning. Once you play that, you can really see the abyss between them. CotW really fixes the game. Correction, it doesn't fix the previous scenarios, but the 5 stories included in CotW are great and all of them should have been done in a similar style. Too bad it's not stand-alone (you still need at least the base game).

Thx Tox for pointing this out. I still have to play Call of the Wild, but often I've heard comments similar to yours, so my hopes are high

Faust, have you considered Call of Cthulhu - LCG? That one is a totally terrific game!

I have seen it and considered ordering it several times but it's a two-player game, isn't it? Like, I can't play solo? If that's the case then it'll be the last on my list to pick up--though it might beat out MoM since at least it's less expensive.

I've never played MoM but Julia's experience is enough to put me off.

I used to play the CoC RPG many years ago, which was great. No longer in touch with anyone interested in RPGs.

I still play Chaosium's Mythos CCG, which I enjoy. You can play this solitaire and is good if you have a lot of cards to choose from.

Well, Roll20 is a great place to get together folks for CoC. There's plenty of people on there eager to either play or learn how to play, and a sever lack of Keepers to run games.

Faust, sadly, there is absolutely no way you can solo CoC LCG. The game is brilliant, if you play unconstructed against unconstructed the decks are still quite balanced, but in no way you can't play without a real opponent.

Its ok. I much prefer AH. You are asking the AH forum after all. I enjoy being the Keeper - it is a fun evening that way. I have not seen the expansions (only a few print ons) and I like the look of the outdoors one with the allies. So it has me interested still. The group of 5 who are my gang enjoy it. But they LOVE Arkham.

We have only played MoM a few times and some of those were disasters, especially in the beginning when it came out. Bad tastes linger long.

I pretty much agree with what Julia says, I dont try to go all out to win. Thats why it is ok.

Besides, if you want the MoM experience but in a time-tested game that is very highly rated, I would recommend House on the Hill. I've not played it but I've heard nothing but good things about it.

This one is from Call of the Wild, right?

I don't know about Call of the Wild. And I got the title wrong, it's:

Betrayal at House on the Hill. It's made by Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro.

Hello,

Thank you all. AH it is......till death do us part.....

Yours thankfully

GM

Ok, Betrayal at the House on the Hill. It's a good game, but with a major flaw as well: for the first part of the game, there isn't so much going on, and the structure tends to repeat itself over and over (enter the house, someone got possessed, and then...)

Plus, I don't know how much they rebalanced the scenarios for the revised edition of Betrayal, but in most of the games I've played of the original, the outcome was not particularly close, and was easily influenced by unforeseeable details involving items or location setup or what have you.

I mean, I'm still very fond of it; it's an immersive and entertaining experience of exactly the sort that (pre-Call-of-the-Wild?) MoM aspires to be, but deep down it seems to have the same problem: it's a worst-of-both-worlds approach that combines a boardgame's cookie-cutter scenario-building with an RPG's lack of competitive rigor.