As you climb higher up the mountain, you will notice that the iconography is not consistent with colors, shapes, or text changing.

Madness cards affect a player’s ability to communicate by changing the way they behave, talk or move. Lovecraftian themes may be overdone in the board game industry, but this game provides a new and clever twist that’s worth checking out, even if you’re not a Lovecraft fan. As the challenges become more complex, communication is ever more important but your communication is ever more hindered by you and your mad team of scientist friends. Ultimately, the goal of the game is to get off the mountain with as many relics, and as few wounds, as possible. It’s hard to know whether it’s more rewarding to succeed (and play seriously) or fail and have more fun doing it.There’s certainly no shortage of Madness games, and even if you enjoy the theme you might wonder what possibly could be new about this iteration.

That said, I liked the description you gave of the game, but I had the same reaction that Wade did, in that the cards would become a known quantity too easily and the game would be just a routine of how to play around it, rather than play with it. Once the group moves the Encounter Phase begins and the tile is flipped, revealing the reward for successfully completing the tile.On the first turn, the Leader will take one of the Coast tiles and place it in front of them, placing the airplane onto the empty space. At some point, players will repeat madness cards, but because players can’t discuss their madness during the game, no one will know for sure what’s going on. The number ranges become tighter, and the tiles mess with your perception by changing up the color of the icons. Mountains of Madness is a fully co-operative game for 3–5 where players are members of an expedition trying to survive and escape having together collected more relics than injuries.

Overall, it strikes a fine balance - not too zany as to be off-putting, but not too timid that it becomes dull or meaningless. Numerous additional Assets, Spells, Artifacts and Conditions may help investigators or harm them, and for the first time, Adventures and Prelude cards shape the international struggle against the Ancient Ones. After PLS1, many bought Seafall (IronWall Games) with high hopes only later to dismiss this competitive legacy game as a disappointment. For example, they might require you to stand during the discussion or raise your hand before speaking.If the opposite is true, the expedition turned out to be much too costly for the few discoveries made and you lose the game. Those discussions and the planning remind me of the discussions in Werewolf as you try to determine who to exile. It offers a strange blend of slapstick player behaviour with a heavy theme and quite a challenging experience.

Each madness card will provide a rule or action that the player must follow through on while communicating during the brief planning period with other players. You might however wish for a bit more depth in what can feel like a slightly too complex party game. 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. Failure means that you have to leave it to the fates and roll a damage die or choose to upgrade your madness card. The survival of your team will depend on your ability to communicate with each other and to coordinate your efforts to overcome each obstacle — but what you discover on the way to the highest peak will strongly test your mental health.The 30 second burst of planning and conversation hampered by the madness cards takes almost all the focus away from the game board and components. What happens in Antarctica has worldwide repercussions as freshly-awakened horrors spread across the globe. But there is no traitor here, only people attempting to communicate and cooperate within increasingly difficult constraints. I sat on the hard, wooden bench in the rear of the plane, surrounded by the arcane artefacts we stole from that mountain. In some ways the game makes me think of Dead of Winter, The Thing Infection at Outpost 31 and Werewolf, just without the traitor aspects.