Wasted opportunity – Mansions of Madness Review

I only discovered lovecraft 2 years ago and in that time I have devoured all his writings and was still hungry for more. Naturally, when I discovered Fantasy Flight I jumped onto every Lovecraft product they have released to date. Mansions of Madness Second Ed. was supposed to be the perfect marriage between the tactile satisfaction of tabletop gaming and the technological efficiency of an application. I envisioned an app that would tend to the heavy lifting of card management, combat encounters, and most importantly, narrative progression. Unfortunately, FFG wasted this opportunity. The app is suitable for basic storytelling and game management. It gets you from the short intro to a fairly varied conclusion with few technical problems in between. The reason I consider this a missed opportunity is that with a little passion they could have leveraged the app for limitless immersion and variation within the meager selection of missions. For example, whenever you encounter a particular puzzle or locate a scenario related clue you typically just select one of a handful of item cards or even worse, you grab the circumstantial evidence card. A blood stained journal left behind by a mysterious protagonist? Oh look, the “evidence card”. A strange series of tracks in the mud that might lead you to the villain hidden among your comrades? Oh wait, just grab a clue token. Invaluable information passed on to you that could ahed light on the enigmatic note scribbled on the bathroom mirror? You guessed it...no notes to jot down for a later encounter, no critical information pertaining to a particular lock, not even an interesting detail that might aid an observant and savvy detective when the moment of truth arrives. Why go through all that trouble when you can simply use the “wild card” or the trusty clue token? The majority of play throughs typically involve searching for tokens or a few items. Take too long and get overwhelmed in combat. The narrative portions of the game seem almost superfluous. It is as though the designers figured that a few paragraphs of narration are all you need, and after a pile of clue tokens and dice rolls the tidy little conclusion provides the 10 seconds of framing for the experience. I wanted more! I wanted to find a journal on the floor in the study and actually have its words mean something to the outcome of the game. I wanted a good detective to bring a pencil and notepad and flip through important clues that may go unnoticed by less observant players. I didnt want to roll a die to see if the investigator “lucked” their way into a drawer; I wanted the drawer combination to be the birthday of the scientist’s wife. I wanted to discover that birthday on a card investigated in the kitchen. I wanted to pull out my scratch paper and recall the narrative clues to give me an edge in solving the mystery and escaping alive. I found that in my group of friends we were able to reach the same endings in missions without reading anything. We simply move, investigate, look for whatever symbol is being tested, and then guessing our way through the dismally repetitive puzzles. We noticed that too much emphasis was put on the “2nd Edition” in the name of the devs stuck too close to the ideas in the first edition, and by doing so they completely failed to reinvent the game as a completely independent creation. The app is so blatantly gimmicky that we agreed we would rather play without it if only there was an option to do so in the second edition. What the game was missing, first and foremost, was a writer who wasnt afraid to focus on the details in the messages strewn about the beautifully created environments. FFG wonderfully fleshes out the Lovecraftian universe in all their games, but in this specific iteration they seemed to forget that true money-spending fans dont buy the same rehashed products over and over for “new editions”. We throw our money at them because each detail they weave into the fantasy is another thread in the stories we use to escape from the real world. And unfortunately for us weekend investigators of the eldritch and enchanted, this particular foray provides little more than a tech-fueled attempt at innovation by a team that forgot the importance of “story” in a story-driven game. By leaning on the power of an app they could have easily imbued each and every detail of an investigation with limitless narrative. Instead, they opted to use an app for the bare basics of utility.
Review by Villains 91355 on Mansions of Madness.