No too long ago I picked up Mansions of Madness by Fantasy Flight Games from my favorite store The Game Castle. I was super excited to give this game a try, and at $70, I was expecting a lot from it.

This thing weighs about 10 pounds, I think.

…and a lot I got. So much stuff is in the box, that we spent nearly 2 hours sorting it all out before we could play. There are 12 types of cards (both regular playing card size and mini ones), 13 types of tokens and markers, 15 map tiles (double-sided, so you have 30 map pieces), monster pieces, player pieces and 2 books.

Here are three scans of the rule book that show the contents (you’ll need Adobe Reader to view them):

Mansions of Madness component list page 1

Mansions of Madness component list page 2

Mansions of Madness component list page 3

…and some shots of the actual pieces…

Maniacs, witches, cult members and Cthulhu monsters. Oh my!

Our hapless Investigators.

This is the map set up for the scenario we played.

All of the items are of high quality, though. No disputing that.

But there’s just SO MUCH. It took a while for us to sort it all out, figure out what was what and get started.

The game plays much like a paper and pencil RPG – one player is the Keeper who knows the story and controls all the monsters. The remaining players are Investigators trying to solve a mystery. The Investigators win if they solve the mystery and the Keeper wins if he can prevent them from doing so.

Each player piece comes with their own unique set of abilities to choose from, so you may not play the same Investigator the same way in consecutive games. Each scenario also has choices that the Keeper must make before play, so each scenario will not be the same from one playing to the next. Kind of a cool feature that I think extends the play-ability of this game. MoM comes with 5 ready-made scenarios and you do, of course, have the option to create your own.

The first few turns were slow and clunky as we made our way through interpreting the rules and sequence. Game play sped up as we became familiar with how things went and were able to organize the plethora of cards and markers we had to use.

One thing I didn’t like was how powerful the monsters seemed to be. The scenario we played called for Maniacs and Zombies. The zombie made it in to play, but did not encounter the players. The maniac was extremely difficult for the players to defeat. I’m not sure if it was because there were only two players, or if I was doing something wrong as Keeper, but the players spent too much time dealing with that monster and it cost them the game because they ran out of time.

I’ll need to play MoM a few more times to sort out the details and actual play-ability of this game. It has promise to be a fun game if all the players are familiar with it so that game play can progress smoothly.