YOU MUST BUY THE BOARDGAME IN ORDER TO USE THE APP.

There, now that is out of the way a quick disclaimer;

I adore anything to do with Lovecraft. Back in the late 80's I started playing Call of Cthulhu and ever since I have followed everything I can to do with the genre. My son, when asked his religion, replies Cultist. This is not a minor addiction.

This game is the closest you can get to playing a real RPG, without most of the hassle - and without the need for a GM. The quality of the figures is not the best, but is good. The board tile system is excellent. The app fulfills its role excellently, with good music and voiceover. Improvement - more voiceover!

My biggest query is replay value - will they release DLC fast enough to get around this?

Do you like playing "live" with your friends? Do you like co-operative board games? Do you hate how one of you is the traitor, or has to play the keeper? Then here is your game!

***PRODUCT WARNING*** This "free" game requires for you to buy the Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition Boardgame - if you do not own it or are not prepared to spend money on it, you may leave the stage. Now that that's out of the way... Got the game, or thinking of buying? Ok, let's move on.

This game offers a more easily immersive, actually co-operative and extremely more replayable experience. Thus far we've played 3 of the 4 beginning missions (that the base game comes with) with my group, and I've played the first one 3 times. Each missions differs from each other, and more importantly FROM ITSELF from iteration to iteration. Want to play the first mission again? Go for it, the seed is redone with new rooms, new drops and, in effect, a different game. Now how does that work, I hear from the back rows. Let me explain!

Of course, each player character makes the play differ. But that's just player interaction, it's similar to a classical board game, just like the random seed of items at the start of the game. Bored, seen it, moving on. But the app actually seeds the game board and random drops differently as well for each play! Sure, there are set events, set drops and set monsters, but anything set with a random flag can be random within the given parameters. With 3 playthroughs of the first mission, I have yet to encounter a boring "seen it" scenario.

I've heard (and read on online boards and reviews) a lot of gripe about the seeding. Instead of the 20-30 minute setup of MoM1ed, it now takes 5 minutes - but every time you explore, you have to set up the new pieces. Some feel this is a grueling task and takes too much effort and time. My question is HOW? The base game comes with 8 square pieces and 18 long pieces with flip sides that are already color coded. Unless your game box is kept in a state that would please all of the Chaos Gods and Old Ones at once, it takes less than half a minute to flip through the pieces to find the right one, place it AND place the corresponding tokens. And the good thing? You can't prepare. You can't count your moves out, know there are monsters lurking in the corners, or be aware of the bum prepared to shiv your sorry ass. IT MAKES YOU THINK BEFORE YOU PLAY, AND THAT IS GOOD. And in my experience, it still takes about the same time over all to set up as it did in MoM1ed, but it's now spread across the game session, causing smaller breaks but enabling bathroom, drinks and snacks breaks if your group feels like it.

Now, the app itself: it's good. It's not perfect; we've crashed it starting a game a few times (causing a reseed of items, happily a thing done in 30 seconds) and it has some glitches, but overall it works fine. The English narrator has in my mind a fitting voice - it's half noire, half horror stories with a touch of gravel and gruff. This is of course personal preference, but I like it. The ambient sound track is good - one player in our group felt it to be actually too pressuring and we had to put it off for the session - I count that one in favor of the app, as it means it conveys the feeling it should. Another nice thing about the app is the seed and reseed: it randoms spawns, items and locations which gives the game a feel of newness every round.

What is the best thing about the app, though, is that it puts all the players on the same side. No more Keeper that actually decides the game by playing full-blow against you or with you. No more 3v1 setups with "well that's a ♥♥♥♥ move" and the players losing because of something they never found out about but the Keeper knew, no more Keeper having to feel bad for winning an easily won fight. No more Keeper making things too easy and letting the players win. Everyone is on the same team, and the opponent is the app. Wanna search that bookshelf: good luck. Opening that door: no, I don't know what's there. Attacking that monster: don't really know what's gonna go down. Of course you learn the game and the gimmicks slowly, but like I said earlier, things change from game to game. You might learn most of a Cultist's attacks, but you can never be sure you know them all.

Wrapping up, I recommend Mansions of Madness. It's a perfect match of a "companion app" with a board game. If you want to play co-op with your friends on a single board, this is one of the best board games around to do it with.

When you buy DLC scenario it should be available on all your devices.. by some kind of account. It sucks you must buy it twice if you use two devices, depending where you are with your game.

I'm quietly confident that I'm not the only person on the planet to have been very excited by the IDEA of the first edition of Mansions of Madness, but a little disappointed by the results. I'm glad to say that the app-powered second edition finally delivers the goods, and despite my initial misgivings about the idea of a board game NEEDING an app in the first place, I'm happy to say it's the digital enhancement in question which finally makes this highly ambitious idea "work".

Yes, that's right, I did say "board game". Not "board game adaptation"...board game! So if you're not willing to: a. move miniatures around a bunch of cardboard tiles, and b. spend quite the bucketload of cash in order to attain said board game elements, you may want to skip this review and Store page altogether.

Oh, and did I say "bucketload of cash"? Now, now, I know that's anathema to Steam customers worldwide, since you're such a bunch of whining pansies who post no end of negative reviews reading "I spent five dollars to get this game on sale, and only got ten hours worth of gameplay out of it. RIPPED OFF. ♥♥♥♥ YOU, GABEN." Yeah, sorry, but you people can just kindly ♥♥♥♥ off at this point. Modern board games are for people with MONEY. Or at least a willingness to spend some money on entertainment that perhaps offers quality over quantity (me, I'm mostly a pauper, but I'm still willing to shell out upon occasion).

Not that this game doesn't offer potentially tens of hours of moderately varied entertainment - possibly more, once they start releasing more expansions and whatnot - but you probably won't be getting thousands of hours of amusement out of your hundred-dollar-plus investment. To me, that kind of math is more than acceptable; if you're not that kind of person, then it's back to your Left 4 Dead 2 or Call of Duty, and no awesome tabletop fetishism for you. Some of us still enjoy a bit of TANGIBLE materialism every once in a while, evil capitalist pigs that we are.

This does bring us to the inevitable question, though: why, in Cthulhu's name, do we need a video game app in order to play a board game? Why would anyone think it's a good idea for these two rather disparate mediums to meet? Well, I was pretty skeptical too, but I gotta say, after this - my first foray into such territory - I'm mostly sold. MOSTLY. Erm...let me explain some more...

Yes, this could have been done purely-and-utterly as a video game. As far as I can deduce, there's no good reason why that couldn't have happened. EXCEPT: Fantasy Flight Games are a board game company, this is a second edition/complete rethinking of an earlier board game of theirs, and besides all this, sometimes tiles and miniatures and cards and dice are JUST ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ COOL. Simple as that.

The first Mansions of Madness tried hard to be the closest thing possible to the classic tabletop role-playing game The Call of Cthulhu transmogrified into somewhat simplified "board game" form. It didn't quite succeed, not least of all because it required one of the players to be the Keeper (also known in other tabletop RPGs as the Dungeon Master or Game Master).

This was its first mistake: a competitive board game, in which it was basically God versus the human investigators, and more often than not, God had the upper hand (what a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ shocker, eh?)! I mean, it was an interesting experiment, trying to transfer such traditional RPG-ish elements into a board game, but as a competitive game it didn't fully work because the investigators and the Keeper weren't really playing the same game with the same rules. It wasn't a level playing field, in other words, and while the designers tried their damndest to make it one, it was all a bit "square peg in round hole"-ish by the end of the day.

Enter the app.

In this new version, the app plays the Keeper, leaving all the players (or just yourself, if you wanna Nigel it up and play alone) free to be the investigators and get on with, well, investigating! And this is where Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition succeeds admirably in being perhaps the best compromise between the worlds of board gaming and tabletop RPG-ing that I, at least, am thus far aware of (though I'll obviously have to check out Descent: Road to Legend in good time). The amount of "agency" granted to the players in this game is quite impressive, and there is a genuine feeling of "adventure" as you explore spooky mansions and other mysterious locales. It's certainly the closest you're liable to get to a single-player tabletop role-playing game this side of your wildest, wackiest dreams.

Sure, you don't get to do crazy ♥♥♥♥ like "I'm going to amass my own army, butcher innocents, and crown myself ruler of the whole kingdom", but then this wouldn't be a board game any more; it'd be a fully-fledged RPG. Given this game's somewhat more narrow, yet still admirably high ambitions, I think they've done a sterling job. I'm still not quite sure how far this app-driven board game thing can be taken - nor am I sure how far it SHOULD be taken - but I can safely opine that it works quite a treat in this instance. The gaming world truly is our communal oyster, and I for one am keen to see what bold new treasures await us in the future. To the cosmos and beyond!

Verdict: 9/10.

(PS Love the sometimes shamelessly Resident Evil-style music! Always a bonus in my book.)

First up, YOU HAVE TO OWN MANSIONS OF MADNESS 2ND EDITION BOARD GAME to get anything from this app. Right with that out of the way, let me review it.

Played Mansion of Madness last weekend using the Android version of this app (techinally identical) and it just works. All the players really enjoyed the experience, which went on for several hours (we played the first scenario I suspect it took about 3 - 3 1/2 hours) totally engrossing thou'

The app runs the game, and it does a mighty fine job of it. When you choose to interact with objects or fight it will randomly pick a stat or give a cool description to your action. Like for instance unarmed combat might be
"You look around a room for anything to hit the monster with do a test on obvservation" or it might say "You take a flying kick at the monster putting all your weight behind it, do a test on strength".

We found the app worked best when one person controls it and reads out what happens (especially with a pc/laptop version). The only real other time the other players get to use it is for solving puzzles. There are a few changes I'd like to see. One is the puzzles themselves, before attempting to solve it would be great if the app asks for the intelligence stat. Then only allow the player to do that number of moves rather than relying on them to be honest. Simple changes like that so mistakes can't be made."

The great thing about the board game + app is no-one has any idea what is going to happen. The app controls it all, giving out random items at the start, and during the mythos phase sometimes randomly affecting a single investigator. I guess the same senario has the same backstory, but randomisation on the maps,clues should make for interesting games.

Finally it keeps track of the puzzles, and monster life stats, meaning you can just get on and play the game :D

At the beginning, it didn't seem to work with my GPU... I've tried 800x600, 1024x768, full resolution either in desktop or mobile graphics quality, full screen or windowed and the game never started. I could just hear the rain falling (I guess this is what you hear when you are at the main menu?). The screen didn't even change, not even in black screen. it just stuck having captured my desktop background.
On the other hand, someone from the software dev team of Fantasy Flight came immediately in contact with me in order to solve the problem.
The problem seemed to be something in my GPU (GeForce 860M) or the version of my drivers. When I tried with the integrated graphics card, it worked properly. I leave this info here in case someone faces the same problem

Board game required!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wonderful game, just wish there were more scenarios!

This app desperately needs an undo function

Realy usefull app.
This app is In dire need for Steam workshop support for user created scenarios.
I doubt we will get it, but the game would benefit tremendously if it happens.

Pros:
- Saves allot of time
- Nice narration
- Interesting scenarios with multipple endings
- Non Intrusive music
Cons:
- music could use more variety
- scenarios layouts could use more variety as well (for those with full tiles collection)

Had no problems using this app so far.