Mansions of Madness

Now, this is what I call a board game. Cards, tokens, plastic figures, a die with 10 sides and a huge thick book of rules. Fortunately for us number one son was able to act as the one controlling the scenario, although fortunately might be going it a bit, as most of the time he was happily sending zombies and axe wielding maniacs our way.

The Mansions of Madness game is different each time you play it, with a set of different levels to work through. While this limits the lifetime of the game a bit, in that once you’ve played a level once you’d not want to play it again, it does make for quite a rich experience, and if you price it out in evenings worth of entertainment it starts to look good value, even if the game itself is quite expensive.

I played a gangster with a Tommy gun and a down on monsters in general, but with a quite astounding lack of physical ability, as evidenced by my knack of throwing exactly the wrong numbers consistently. However, with help from a typewriter wielding companion we managed to solve the gruesome mystery and get out alive. Towards the end things got really tense, as I struggled to shoot a zombie and avoid being burnt alive, while at the same time hunting to uncover the awful truth.

One good thing about this particular game is that although it is necessarily quite complex, the games themselves don’t take around a week or so to finish, we ended up having a couple of hours of fun, which is just about right I reckon. A good, social, alternative to watching the telly or playing video games methinks.