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Mansions of Madness: Second Edition v1

Mansions of Madness

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

Lovecraftian horror meets 21st century tech and the Mansions of Madness: Second Edition rules summary and reference.

The original Mansions of Madness was great fun, but it had a few issues: excessive fiddliness, long preparation, setup and pack up times, and most egregious of all, a few gaping errors in its scenarios. But for older gamers like me, it harkened back to the old days when you had to put a bit more effort into a game to see it shine.

Mansions of Madness Second Edition is a completely different beast, because all the fiddliness and effort has been swept away by tying the game to an app. And despite my initial misgivings, the game really is more fun for it. Sure, I still have a nostalgic twinge of sadness for the complexity of the original, and I’m still not a big fun of introducing apps to my wonderful tech-free hobby, but the plots are more cohesive and the whole experience smoother.

Sadly, the crappy miniature design from first edition remains. Understandably I suppose, so first edition users can still use their old figures and map tiles, but a shame as they really are sub-par. My only other misgiving is the excessive amount of text that players have to read out, but that’s par for the course for this kind of game.

But when it comes down to it, most of the first edition scenarios will sit on my shelves unplayed, as this new edition is the one that will hit the table when I’m feeling like a wander through an old dark house at imminent risk of my sanity and health.

One Comment

  • Jeremy L Wong says:

    Oh boy, I can’t wait to print these out. I really didn’t enjoy the 1st edition’s rules. The boards were nice but the minis were… um… functional?

    But I played 2e and I was blown away! I, like you , was very skeptical of the app, but it won. I’ve got other games that have more complexity, and the app makes the game easy to rope others into playing it with me. While I don’t exactly like adding computers and such to my games, I think that in this case, the results make it worthwhile.

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