Iello IEL51374 Mountains of Madness Board Game, Multicolour

Product Information

It’s hard to know whether it’s more rewarding to succeed (and play seriously) or fail and have more fun doing it.

Failure means that you have to leave it to the fates and roll a damage die or choose to upgrade your madness card. The die result can also lead to confusion which forces the Leader to discard as many cards from the Equipment deck as the difference between the total value of cards played of the required type and the failed challenge value.So you have to plan ahead for this - rest too much and you burn through your leadership tokens; rest too few times and you'll not have enough cards to pass tests.

Chris enjoys the simple things in life, like teaching his wife the newest review game, looking up Ketogenic recipes, and playing 10 hour long indie games on Steam. But, I've learned about myself that I like games that evoke laughter and joy, In some ways the game feels like one of those social deduction games like Werewolf, but it also has some of the same tenseness and feeling of games like Dead of Winter or The Thing Infection at Outpost 31. Leadership tokens are also used for other abilities, like restarting the Encounter phase or refreshing cards. But these madnesses range from something that straightforward to things more silly or even devious – only speaking when asked a question, for example, or when making eye contact.You’ve got to figure things out, and since time is limited and everyone has their own hand of cards, you can’t rely on one person telling everyone else what to do. The Encounter Tiles are sorted by type and a set number of each are placed face down randomly on the matching spaces on the board.

That could be taking wounds (worthless cards that clog the deck), gaining madness, or losing leadership. The meat of the game falls in those 30-second expedition resolutions, so if those moments aren’t exciting enough for you, I’m not sure the game will work.It offers a strange blend of slapstick player behaviour with a heavy theme and quite a challenging experience. I don’t know if it will sit on my shelf for the occassional play, or if it’ll move on to a new owner once my group has mastered it in another couple plays. The tile numbers will start as a range (say, 10-12), but as you get higher will end up as just single number targets. If the total value of each required equipment type equals or falls within the given range of numbers, then the challenge was a success. Thing is that you’d be surprised at how quickly you’ll be discarding them, especially if you have some inexperienced players.