Mansions of madness - Game Review

We played mountains of madness the other day the new call of Cthulhu based board game. Mark had played before and offered to act as keeper having set up a rather elaborate board before we arrived. The game was intuitive and lasted just under two hours. At one point it looked like the investigators had no chance as a Chthonian was summoned, and there were five Cultists lurking around, but due to a few shriving spells (and the fact that 2 cultists were sacrificed to summon the Chthonian) we soon destroyed it and won the day. Without the spell our choice of characters would have had no chance as we had no missile weapons and were physically weak. Playing again we would give careful consideration in respect of the mix of characters and skills.

During the game Paul was pointed out that he should act as if the shoggoth had not been summoned as his playing piece was not in the room concerned. Obviously tongue in cheek, but we did remind him that we would never win a board game if he played like that.

A feature I quite liked was the introduction of some physical puzzles which delayed the players if they could not quickly find the solution. The puzzles were simple but made difficult for us give the poor light we play under (which I had not really noticed before) which made it difficult to distinguish colours and some shapes/markers. Additionally one of our players is colour blind and he could not complete the puzzle he had, not really a problem as we just let someone else do it with his characters stats.

Overall a good game, with very high quality components, including a number of nice miniatures. Perhaps the format is a little too similar to a linear RPG adventure as in general A needed to be done before B however I can see this one coming out again.