Iello IEL51374 Mountains of Madness Board Game, Multicolour

Product Information

I enjoy it, as does my gaming group, but I could see how the mix would fall flat for players who lean one way or the other.

Upon opening the Mountains of Madness box you’ll be hit by the stark white plastic tray, a good fit for the snowy scenery and the components, that all have their own space. Since a cooperative game normally hinges upon the successful communication of information between players, this presents a distracting and, at times, off-putting hurdle to victory, making this one of the more difficult cooperative games I’ve played. A number of Injury Cards are drawn from the deck equal to the number of players and placed in the Equipment discard stack. It is challenging, exciting, and hilarious to play but requires more strategy than most party games and more extroversion than most strategy games which may make this game tough to find an audience for. Pro tip, try not to spoil the madness cards for yourself too much when setting up and enjoy the surprise firsthand.Now what makes this part crazy is you cannot describe to your teammates anything about the value of the cards you're playing. In later phases, you may instead face the challenge on the board itself if you’ve already faced the tile challenge. At least one person also must be willing to be ‘that guy’ and rules-lawyer discarding Leadership tokens as appropriate, which can drain the fun from a game quickly, or if no one’s willing to do it then make the game quite trivial. Each tile will show 2 or 3 challenges along with the accompanying symbol for the type of equipment needed, as well as a number or range of numbers required to complete the challenge.

Daviau definitely could have run this through a few more paces to fine-tune some of the variance mechanics. Leadership tokens are also used for other abilities, like restarting the Encounter phase or refreshing cards. That said, I found us spending these more out of necessity than strategy, because the encounter phase especially is so chaotic, and you really need more cards for higher levels. The interactions are so unique that it is a challenge to gauge the game as either a party game or a cooperative game or strategy game. By using the equipment on your cards, you must work together to overcome these horrifying challenges.I like the mechanic of these here - giving a bit of variance and control to what could just be a staid, high-RNG mechanic with hand management.