Mansions of Madness uses a modular board, tiles that are the rooms of the mansion, streets and surrounding areas.
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It also makes the game fully cooperative, all players against the game rather than against the keeper. This makes it into a unique hybrid of board game and App. The app will send enemies after the investigators, but in a general way, “Move 2 spaces towards the nearest investigator” for example. It does not keep track of your investigators or enemies on the board – that is why this is still a board game. It also tracks hits on the enemies so you know when you have defeated them.
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It tells you what gets placed into rooms when you open them and what happens when you interact with specific items. In the Second Edition it is the App who is in effect “the keeper” and it is responsible for keeping track of everything you need. Can you imagine this happening when you had been playing for an hour? Not fun! And I don’t want to be the Keeper. If anyone has heard of Mansions of Madness (First Edition), one player had to take on the role of “The Keeper” and sit down for approximately 40 minutes to setup a game, making sure all the clues were hidden correctly and if they made one mistake, like they forget to hide the key to unlock the final door, the whole game would fall apart. Whatever side of that fence you sit on, we think this App really improves this game and we ask you to continue reading before you make up your mind. We understand that there is a lot of debate and passionate opinions about Apps in board games. In fact, Journeys was based on this game. Before we get into reviewing the game, we should also note that much like The Lord of the Rings – Journeys in Middle-earth, this game uses an App.