Mansions of Madness - Tips & Strategies

As noted previously, the Uncontrollable Urges card was deemed too powerful, and changed to only be used once PER INVESTIGATOR per turn.

I’ve found that even with this change, the Keeper may want to be careful of how often they use the card, for the sake of the enjoyment of the players. I’ve seen a few games where, even using Uncontrollable Urges once per investigator per turn, the game lost its fun for the players.

This is especially true when an investigator has to bring an item to a certain room. Even when running (moving three spaces per turn), a Keeper using Uncontrollable Urges to push them back a space can make this take unbearably long. If a key is needed to open a door before any other player can do anything useful, the game grinds down, limiting everyone’s enjoyment.

As a Keeper, you may increase your chances of winning by grinding out the players with Uncontrollable Urges, but I recommend paying attention to the group dynamic. As a Keeper, I would much rather lose to a group of players that enjoyed the experience, than win against players that wish they hadn’t played in the first place.

Mansions of Madness is a game where the experience is a major part of the game. Use Uncontrollable Urges to your advantage while playing the Keeper, but not to the detriment of the game.

Create a cover to put on top of the pile of room cards so players don’t know if there are clues, locks, obstacles or just items in a room. It makes the game more fun, as players won’t rush to rooms with locks in them.

It can be confusing waiting until the keeper phase to swap items, or spend such valued actions to drop items for others. I’ve found that so long as two players share a space at any point, they are allowed to give or swap ONE item.

It just seems more realistic– if I’m passing my buddy in a spooky mansion and I want to toss her an ax, I’ll toss her an ax. We’re not going to fumble through our pockets and reorganize our belongings, but a quick coordinated swap makes sense– these people can multitask and talk, actions are reserved for more important events.

Of course, to prevent game breaking, if you’re giving the item that turn, you can’t have used it that turn.

Killing investigators too soon is usually a serious mistake on the keepers part. Beat them down and load them up with as many nasty status’s as you can – but don’t finish the job until the plot is revealed – otherwise they just respawn at full health.

Of course, don’t grief them too much, or they’ll never want to play again. I try to point out the humor/narrative of the conditions to help them identify more with the story that’s unfolding.

As an investigator, time is not on your side, the longer you spend bumbling around, the more time the Keeper has to break you down. In order to move quickly listen carefully to the clues and the initial set up story – they usually give some sort of indication what room you need to check out next – “The corpse has spaghetti sauce stains all over his shirt” – better check out the kitchen.

This game really should come with some better storage compartments.

When starting a game, some pieces are set up by the investigators, and some are set up by the keeper. If you have your pieces split between the two, it saves time. While the investigators lay out the board, the Keeper can make his decisions and seek out the cards he needs. While he’s placing the cards on the board, the investigators can talk to each other and pick out their characters and maybe decide on a rough exploration strategy.

Organize your pieces, organize your tasks, make sure you have lots of space to play, and it won’t feel like such a chore to set the game up every time.

There are a number of cards which have received offical errata since the first printing, by the designers of Mansions of Madness. The address below takes you to a .pdf of the updates (it also includes errata that appeared in the first edition).

Summary of cards with changes:

Uncontrollable Urges (Keeper) – may only be used once per investigator per turn

Eldrich (Combat Card) – Abomination stikes, using tentacle as a whip: Swap the pass and fail effect; passing should have no effect.

Story 1 – Objective Card 1A – When revealed, discard all lock cards, and remove Maniac Attacks Keeper Action

Story 1 – Objective Card 1C – Keeper wins by killing TWO investigators instead of ONE

Story 5 – Map has a few mistakes, see link below for corrections.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/mansions-of-madness/support/mansions-faq-v-2.pdf

Puzzles have a tendency to break up the flow of the game when these enter play – you need to fish out the pieces, assemble them etc.

Take care of that pre-game – the Keeper will know which puzzles might be a part of the game – have everything laid out and ready to go so that you spend minimum time on set-up and maximum time driving your friends insane.

With 2 movements and one action, at the beginning of the game there are many rooms to explore. A lot of people decide to explore everywhere its possible, but… this means spend time too.
Every time you spend a action to make a search, you waste 50% of your advance. Multiply this each round and you will see that you could reach some clues much more fast!
If you focus to reach the room with clues and follow them fast to reach the next one, you will gain a lot of time to win the game.
Leave the search for the ones who is not follow the clues at the moment. In general not everybody goes to the same room at the same time.

I’ve tried this game a couple of times now, every time as a player, and what’s worked best for me is to get to the clues as quickly as possible. It’s difficult to heal yourself with only one action per turn and it’s not worth getting sidetracked with potentially good looking gear.