Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It’s not all video games, here at OMG-Central. I also enjoy old school, across the table, low-tech board games.

If you’re one of those for whom “board games” only evokes images of Monopoly and Parcheesi, let me tell you, these are not your grandma’s board games. They’ve changed a lot, in past decades, and they keep changing, adding new mechanics, new twists on old methods, and sometimes even extending “beyond the box” to include other media and technologies.

One such game is Mansions of Madness (2nd Edition, from Fantasy Flight Games, $85). It’s a fully cooperative game—everyone wins, or everyone loses—that combines the tried-and-true mechanics of tile placement, die rolls, and figurines with the beyond-the-box technology of a companion app. The app is designed to guide players through any one of thirteen different scenarios. This way, everyone learns of the mystery and the goals simultaneously. There is no “Game Master” here. The app is in charge.

I was somewhat leery of a board game with such technology attached, primarily because I know from experience that technology is much more fluid than board games. A game can last for decades, but technology breaks down and gets “enhanced” beyond my hardware’s ability to run it, or the company that supports it can go under, leaving their app (and game) to die on the vine. And Mansions of Madness is a game that cannot be played without the app. It’s useless without it.

Despite this reservation, I was drawn in by the cooperative nature of the game, by the promise of replayability, and by the overwhelmingly positive reviews on retail and board-game sites.

I was really hoping it would live up not only to its reputation, but also to its rather hefty price tag.

Well, it didn’t.

For game mechanics, theme, artwork, and quality, Mansions of Madness gets high marks. On these elements, I’m in agreement with the reviewers.

The app, however, was a little off-putting. At first, it failed to work properly and I had to uninstall/reinstall the entire 640MB application (like I said: technology is fluid), but even after that, I felt like there was an interloper at our gathering, a stranger telling us what to do. It was a bit clunky at times—e.g., the text that tells you where to place a token often covers up the place where you’re instructed to place it—but overall it worked well (after reinstalling, that is).

We played the “beginner” scenario which, despite learning curves and mistakes, we managed to survive. Afterward, I explored the same scenario to see how replayable it was. For my money, it wasn’t. Sure, some of the starting items for the team changed, and the app sometimes rearranged the mansion’s layout, but every replay had the same monsters, clues, items, and (most disappointingly) goal. This eliminates a lot of the replayability. Once you’ve succeeded in the scenario, once you know the steps you need to perform in order to reach the final action, then every replay session is just an exercise in gaming the game, learning how to do the same thing, better. In this game, replayability only exists if you fail, and that’s not replayability; that’s practice.

But it was in exploring the other twelve scenarios that I actually got angry.

Yes. Angry. I got angry at a board game.

You see, for my $85, I thought I was getting thirteen scenarios with a high level of replayability. What I got was four scenarios. The remaining nine scenarios required additional purchases.

• Four scenarios are playable with the base game ($85) and app (free)
• Two scenarios require an in-app purchase of $5 each (total $10 extra)
• One scenario requires the purchase of the Recurring Nightmare expansion ($40)
• One scenario requires the Suppressed Memories expansion ($35)
• Two scenarios require the Beyond the Threshold expansion ($35)
• Three scenarios require the Streets of Arkham expansion ($55)

This means, in order to play the thirteen scenarios, I have to spend $260, or three times the original investment.

That’s $260 for thirteen gaming sessions with very limited replayability.

Now, you could argue that, since it works out to about $20 per successful scenario, that’s a pretty good price point for a once-and-done game. I might agree with you, except that I don’t value once-and-done games as highly as I do games I can play over and over again. I’d rather spend $50 on a game I can play dozens of times than spend $20 on a game that I toss after one session.

So, Mansions of Madness will be relegated to the garage, not my gaming shelves. It might possibly see my table again, as I try one of the other “free” scenarios, but chances are slim. I have other games that don’t gouge me every time I pull them out.

k