You never know what’s around the corner and that’s scary in a palpable way. By obfuscating the layout of our horrific journey the design instills legitimate mystery. What’s even better is that the application facilitates enhanced atmosphere, not just with that creepy public-domain gothic soundtrack, but by fostering an actual sense of exploration. All you need are a couple of characters and a single room, and away you go. You don’t need to organize and pre-seed stacks of little cards meant for the hands of a toddler. You don’t need to setup the halls of the creepy mansion ahead of time. You can also pull the box off the shelf and start playing almost immediately. The iPad loses that altercation every time. There’s no more arguing about who gets to play Ashcan Pete and who’s stuck playing fishmen and cultists.
And in this particular instance it’s magnificent. Automation isn’t just hitting our automobiles and checkout counters, it’s hitting our precious cardboard adventures too. By shifting the story-engine from human opposition and a collection of sorted cardboard to angry bytes of wonderful mystery – there is a true sense of innovation and progress. The fragility was the first element addressed in this new edition. It was our quaint board game version of “in our day we walked through five feet of snow to get to school!” We didn’t have an app to hold our hands and braid our hair, and it was perfectly fine. The prominent flaw, that the whole game could go belly up by the Keeper misplacing a single card, well it was something we lived with. It promised an experience that felt RPG-adjacent, as if you were working your way through a prettier but more stringent Chaosium module penned by their B-team. The first edition was captivating particularly for its ambition. This was 2011 and we were young and naive. It was easy to look past the soft and fugly (that’s short for fucking ugly) miniatures because it was a different time. It had a look about it – that typical FFG spread of token buffet atop wonderfully illustrated room tiles. It was a messy hybrid of dungeon crawler and mysterious story game that could leave you in wonder or constipation, depending on how your particular Lovecraft vignette developed.
I still remember the original Corey Konieczka design fondly. Right now I’m working my way through the latest expansion, The Sanctum of Twilight, and feeling all somber and poetic. I shared my enthusiasm for the game here. I’ve already written thousands of words on this new edition. But a game being released by perhaps the largest player in our industry with only a week’s notice? That’s absurd. This is an age where we buy the idea of games years in advance, a time where people are in a hurry to open the box of my latest purchase for me and broadcast it on YouTube.
Yet this reimagined big box title lurched from the basement without a peep. This is a company that typically rolls a parade of articles out on its digital home months in advance of a release. This is what escaped our collective mouth when Fantasy Flight Games released the second edition of Mansions of Madness during Gen Con of 2016.
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