To date I haven’t paid any attention to Kickstarters in this blog under the theory that it’s better to talk about games when they’re done and published. However, two current Kickstarters caught my eye, so I decided to give them some attention in this and an upcoming column. In each case, the Kickstarting publisher sent me a prototype and I gave it a play, so that I could write about it here.
Monster Mansion ( Kickstarter link ) caught my eye because it’s a new co-op game. Though I’ve only touched upon the category of games here, I’ve actually written a book on the topic with Christopher Allen that we hope to get to print next year. So, it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart.
Enter Monster Mansion. It’s a game where you’ve been dropped down into the basement of a monster-filled mansion and are trying to get out. All you have to do is make it through three dungeon rooms, get to the stairs, rush through three mansion rooms, then make it out the exit.
Easy enough? Of course not.
The Challenges
Each co-op game starts with a challenge system: the thing that endangers the players’ characters and pushes them toward losing the game. In Monster Mansion there are two sets of challenges: the monsters and the mansion (hence the name).
The monsters appear via encounter cards. Each player draws one at the start of his turn, which is a pretty classic methodology for “activating” a challenge system. Though most of the deck consists of monsters that the players have to deal with (or else slightly less dangerous traps), there are also quite a number of “whiffs” — and boy are players relieved when they draw a whiff instead of a monster. That’s exactly the sort of thing that you want in this sort of encounter draw, because it gives you excitement and variability.
The mansion is slowly unveiled over the course of the game as the players explore it. Almost every room is bad, so there’s less excitement here, but the different effects in different rooms keep players on their toes — and also gives them the opportunity to make tactical decisions as they move through rooms.
Overall, the challenge system for Monster Mansion is successful. The object of a good challenge system is to make it impossible for players to have all the answers as they rush through a co-op game, but to still reward them for being smart; Monster Mansion does a good job of maintaining that tension.
The Cooperation
The flipside of a challenge system is the question of how players work together, and Monster Mansion provides lots of opportunities here too. To start with, players can heal each other and they can assault the monsters who are bedeviling their friends. However, Monster Mansion’s cooperation goes beyond this by adopting another classic co-op methodology: each player’s character has unique characteristics that force them to work together. You want the bruiser to do the fighting and the healer to do the healing, so you try to arrange things so that happens. Character special abilities push this strategic cooperation even further. One player is great at providing luck to his fellows, another can take damage for his fellows, etc.
I had some concerns that the cooperation would be too total: it looked like players might end up grouping together and become too much of a gestalt. Fortunately, the natural flow of the game kept that from happening: one character (the “double trouble” twins) was great at rushing ahead because he had extra actions, while sometimes a player character would get killed and moved back to the last “save point”; the rest of his compatriots had to nonetheless keep pushing forward (or else go back for him!).
Despite the lack of specific cooperative systems, the general gameplay of Monster Mansion supported working together in a way that was meaningful, but not overpowering.
The Real-Time
All of this gameplay happened in real-time, with a clock counting off the minutes as you tried to get out of the mansion.
I recent wrote about real-time games because I enjoy them, but I have to admit that I didn’t have very high hopes for this game’s real-time play. That’s because it’s not really integrated into the gameplay. In comparison Damage Report (2014) precisely times every action that you take while Space Alert (2008) carefully doles out information as the time slowly runs down. In comparison, in Monster Mansion you can take actions as fast or as slow as you want, and the goal is just to get out of the mansion in time.
I think this lack of sophistication might impact the enjoyment of Monster Mansion in the long term (particularly if you get really fast at playing the game). Nonetheless, it definitely works on a first play. We became more and more frenzied as the timer dropped down and finally escaped the mansion just in time — with less than a minute left. We were excited, pumped, and definitely yelling. That’s why I like real-time games, and it worked here.
The Variants
I had concern with winning the game the first time out, as that shouldn’t usually happen with a co-op game. Fortunately, Monster Mansion has some very simple ideas for tuning the game to get it right for your playing group: you can change the timer or change the size of the mansion to make the game easier or harder.
The game also has a variant that we didn’t try out (because we didn’t have the 4 players required) where one of the players is secretly a VIP and another is secretly an assassin, trying to kill the VIP — which is what I call “traitor” gameplay, like in Shadows over Camelot (2005), Battlestar Galactica (2008), and others. And, there’s yet another “Hunger Games” variant where it’s everyone for themselves.
I have some qualms about games that try to be co-op games and traitor games and competitive games. Room 25 (2013) is a somewhat similar game that tried to do so, and I found that the competitive game was great, but the others fell flat. In this case, I enjoyed the full co-op game and designer assures me the traitor game is very fun as well … but I’ll leave it to other reviewers to cover that topic.
The Rest of the Game
I can’t really speak too much to the components of the game, because what I was received was a simply printed prototype. The art and layout were OK; if produced well, it could be a good publication, though the graphic design isn’t at the level to make it great. However, the theming is a lot of fun.
I do have two caveats to the game, which both come down to the fact that it was somewhat simple.
First, there are a lot of dungeon-exploration games out there, and this one isn’t that varied from the norm. There are rooms to explore and traps to get through and monsters to kill. One of the players was reminded of a very simplified form of Dungeoneer (2003) and I couldn’t disagree. What makes this one different is the real-time element, but that’s the only major difference.
Second, I didn’t find any of the actual mechanics to be that innovative. This is a simple adventure game with characters and monsters that have a few stats that allow them to fight each other.
Mind you, some of this might have been necessary to keep the game simple enough to play in quick real-time.
Conclusion
Monster Mansion has some of the co-op play of Betrayal at House on the Hill (2004), where you cooperatively explore an unknown and spooky house, some of the exploration play of Dungeoneer (2003), where you flip dungeon rooms up as you move, and some of the adventure play of Arkham Horror (1987, 2005), where you have characters with stats and can gather equipment. If you like some of those games, you’re probably in the right demographic for Monster Mansion.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for eurogamers, but I would probably recommend it for American players looking for some cooperative fun.
And here’s that Kickstarter again.
