Overview & How to Play

Mansions of Madness throws you into a detailed, Lovecraftian world, but playing it is surprisingly easy, thanks to the app.

You simply download that to a device of choice, and simply pick a scenario and your investigators to start. Each scenario will have a specific goal, where you might not even know it from the start, but you’ll be given a good idea of what to expect due to intro narrations. Eventually, you’ll play through the scenario, and piece it all together to progress towards your true objective.

Every round has two phases: the Investigator Phase where players do their actions, and the Mythos Phase, where the game will do bad stuff to you. During the Investigator Phase, players have 2 actions each, like moving or attacking, or exploring new parts of the map. A key thing to remember is that the game asks for a lot of skill checks, where the investigators must make a check for certain tasks like casting a spell or breaking a lock, by rolling die and counting successes.

Once everyone’s gone you move onto the Mythos Phase. This loop of investigators, then a Mythos thingy, happens until game ends in success or failure. You win when you succeed in uncovering and completing the hidden goal, and lose from scenario specific effects, or if someone dies from taking too much damage.

Pros

We really can’t go any further without talking about the app, and my oh my do we give it some high praise. Once you get the app downloaded, it really does run smoothly with almost no hiccups that we’ve ever found. You’ll be immediately introduced to a great UI, where nothing’s obtrusive and symbols are clearly labeled; you’ll be familiarized with it very quickly. The sound design and music is overall enjoyable, with introduction narrations, and sound effects aplenty in scenarios.

Mansions of Madness just has a lot of great contextual flavor. There’s loading screen text, monsters attacking you with their own specific details, scenario appropriate descriptions of things in the house, and of course Mythos events that eat away at your group’s sanity. There’s even small dialogue trees for each notable NPC you’ll meet!

The app also instills an excellent sense of urgency for each story, where the Mythos Phase will urge players to hurry up, with contextual warnings. Eventually, all hell will break loose, in a steady flow of increasingly terrible things… so hurry!

Since the app is providing all the bookkeeping, this game is insanely easy to setup for such a big game, all you have to do is put down the first map tile, and take out a handful of components or cards that the app tells you to get. Last thing about the app praise— it allows for neat puzzles to be executed within the app, like for when you’re lock-picking, that saves a ton of space and randomizes well.

The 4 stories are also really enjoyable, with a good range in difficulty and playtime, so you can alter your experience to your schedule. They are each thematically driven and driven in their own ways, where you NEED to pay attention to all the context that comes up. Otherwise, you’ll suffer consequences, like if helpful NPCs die, or if you don’t read your evidence to avoid running into a dangerous red herring. Stories could be a suspect investigation in a town over 4 days, escaping a haunted port in one night, or just helping an old friend fix her house. Differing map tiles really help keep this depiction alive.

Every scenario’s map has tons of points of interest, just like what you’d expect in a mystery game—with potential hidden doors, interact-able objects, and Search tokens everywhere. There’s so many tantalizing bread crumbs here that you always have to consider what’s important because you can’t explore everything. This feeling of, there’s always something more that I might have missed, just makes the game feel alive with possibility. 

One thing that cannot be missed is the delightful Insanity mechanic. When your Horror meets or exceeds your character’s mental tolerance, you go insane, getting a new secret objective. Getting to your mental breaking point doesn’t immediately kill characters, but instead changes their win condition that can change their behavior—like always agreeing with the person sitting on their left. Sometimes they’re hilariously dealt a new win condition that starts tampering with the investigation—like starting fires everywhere to bathe in its warm glory. The role-playing derived from this is great, as your teammates can just start doing their own thing and not talk to you after they snap. Mansions was careful enough to scale this insanity objective to your player group, so in multiplayer games you’ll be sure to get some entertaining outcomes. 

Plus, the mechanic that when someone in your party dies, the game immediately ends, goes so well with Insanity. On one hand, no one has to sit out even if they turned Insane. But on the other hand, it makes so much sense that your investigation would stop when someone does die.

Cons & Nitpicks

The app, for all our praise, isn’t perfect. The biggest gripe we have with it is that it is just way too easy to accidentally end the game when an investigator is eliminated. They give you a weird prompt, asking you that, “Are you sure you want to end the game?”. And then saying that there should be one more round of investigators’ turns before you end the game. So you press ‘end game’, thinking that it was intended to be pressed immediately when an investigator is eliminated, but it actually just ends the game on the spot—with no way to undo your game end! This button is misleading because it’s directly underneath another button that says ‘end game’, so you wouldn’t think that the two do the exact same thing.

More gripes come with the message log, that doesn’t provide map visuals just in case you miss a monster, item, or barricade placement. What makes it even easier to miss these placements is that the ‘continue’ button is purely made for touch screen devices, meaning that on computers, you can easily accidentally click it.

On to the most popular complaint about this game, which is the monster stands. They are universally considered bad, with the monsters always falling out of these clunky plastic tiles. We think they may just be meant to take in and out every time you play, but that’s seriously such a hassle, especially with some miniatures not being the strongest structure to push plastic onto plastic every playthrough. Plus, FFG really requires you to find your own storage solution for all the pieces, we found that a plano box worked perfectly.

As for actual gameplay, attacking unarmed is too strong for what it is, where it’s often stronger than attacking with a weak weapon, which disincentives making or finding weapons, which feels thematically off. Then, if you really want to win missions, missions are the most realistic to win with 3 or more players. With more investigators to work together with, you’ll have much more diversity in abilities and action selection.

Final Thoughts

If it wasn’t already obvious from the amounts of Ameiritrash elements here, don’t tryhard when playing this game. If you do, you’ll get frustrated as you witness Insanity, as your fellow teammate screwing over everyone completely throws balance/pacing out the window. Rather, Mansions invites you take in the beauty of tragic epic endings, as investigators may just be one move short from stopping a terrible occult secret. Just strap yourselves in for one hell of an experience, where a more casual mindset will benefit every investigator.