Mansions of Madness

We got to play Mansions of Madness tonight!  If you like Arkham Horror you will love this game.  It's a co-op game where the players are all working against a single player called the Keeper.  The Keeper sets up the game based on a set of specific information.  It's a bit complex to set up, but once you have done it a few times I can imagine it wont be too bad.  The rules them self appear, at first glance, to be very overwhelming. Thankfuly, once you get into the game, it plays very smoothly and flows well.

The players then take turns moving though the mansion trying to uncover the clues to solve the mystery.  Meanwhile, the Keeper is spending Horror tokens to use event cards, summon monsters, and play injury cards to impede the players.  There is a really fun Puzzle Mechanic where the players need to use their Intelligence to solve mechanical and object orientation puzzles to open containers and doors that lock some rooms.   The players had a lot of fun with the puzzles and being terrified of all the nasty abilities the Keeper could play on them.

It was our first time playing but I would say that it feels like the Keeper has an advantage to winning.  I made lots of mistakes and had many opportunities to do some other nasty stuff, I just didn't realize it until the last two turns of the game.  Even with a bunch of actions that I wasn't taking advantage of, I won fairly easily.  The only reason it was close was that I chose to put the final bad guy close enough that the players could reach him.  I could have put him anywhere I wanted and that would have made it impossible for the players to reach him in time.


All in all, it was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to playing it again.  As much as I enjoyed Arkham Horror, there is something a bit more personal about this game that I think I like a little better.  Maybe after a few games I will have a better feel for the game and give another write up to share my thoughts.

New Resource Art and New Games!

I havent had a lot of free time this week, work has been very busy, but I did get to work a little on some my Resource Art for Taipan. 

I am not to happy with the Gun Powder Barrel.  I lost track of what I was doing and ended up with something more detailed and less cartoony than I was originally going for.  You can see how the Rock and the Gold Coins are limited to about 4-6 colors, but the Barrel uses lots of blended colors, stippled shading, etc.  The only part I did correctly was the Black Powder at the top of the barrel. I will go back and redo it when I have the time.

On a side note, and completely unrelated to my game, my friend Bryan just took a bulk order of games from all of our friends to get them at a discounted price.  I put in a request and have these games on the way:

I am very excited to try Mansions of Madness but, if I had half a brain, I should have also got Merchants and Marauders.  Seeing that I am working on a similar type of game, having that on hand as reference might have been a good idea.  Oh well, maybe for Christmas.  =)