Mansions of Madness from Fantasy Flight Games is the second iteration of their H.P. Lovecraft-inspired world. In this cooperative game, you and your fellow players are trying to escape the horrors thrust upon you by a brilliantly designed and integrated app.

As is typical for FFG games, the game includes an abundance of tokens, tiles and decks of cards which are all produced to the industry-leading component quality that FFG is known for. One misstep as far as the game components are concerned is the miniatures. Not only are the sculpts mediocre, but before your first play, you have to 'assemble' the miniatures. This assembly only involves sticking the base and the miniature to each other and inserting a token. This requires one dab of glue on the miniature base being inserted into a hole on the base. In and of itself, not an onerous task ...

However, what I personally found more difficult than it needed to be was inserting the miniatures token into the slot on the base. The manual indicates that you should do that after you've attached the miniature, which I duly did. However the lug from the miniature was not flush with the inside of the base, i.e. the slot in which the token should slide into was obstructed by the miniature lug. This caused several rips and tears on tokens which at the very least is annoying. I should mention that these tokens will never need to be removed (a good job, I don't think I could) and you can only see slight damage to a handful of miniatures' tokens.

The app is absolutely integral to the game and will need to be downloaded before you play. You can get it on either iOS or Android, and also via Steam on Windows or Mac; the Amazon Kindle platform is also supported. If you don't yet own a device that can run the app then don't buy this game. Although the chances of anyone not having the ability to use this app in this day and age are very small. You need the app to drive the game system. The core mechanics of the game, outside of the app are simple and intuitive to understand.

One slight concern I have with an app that is so integral to the game is of longevity. In 20 years time will the app still be around to play; will FFG still exist to support their back-catalogue of games or will it be obsolete? I own and still enjoy games released in the 70s and 80s, will I be able to say the same of this game in a generation or two? It is only a slight concern because aside from death and taxes, I am certain that there will be many more board-games to play and enjoy.

I think FFG have settled on a tried and tested formula for their miniature games and they're sticking to it here. If you've played Descent or Imperial Assault, you'll know what I mean. On their turn, each player-controlled character has two actions, which can be any of their character options: move, attack, trade, interact etc. Interact covers a few closely related app driven components like searching an object within a room, exploring a new room or attempting to solve a puzzle. After each player has moved the Investigator Phase ends and the Mythos Phase begins ...

In the Mythos Phase, the onboard monsters all activate and there may be some extra events or monster spawns which need to be dealt with. Although the players aren't aware (there's no clock or turn counter) there is an intrinsic timer in the app which ramps up the difficulty the longer your group is not progressing through the scenario. The longer you take the more extreme the Mythos Phase becomes.

Mythos Phase screen-shot

The app is very well designed and if anything adds to the level of immersion in the Cthulu-esque world with ambient sound effects. Interacting with the app is a very simple affair and even the most tech-allergic person will be able to control the app after a few turns. However, you should be aware that there is no undo button, once you've confirmed an action on the app you can't go back and do something else. If you confirm an action by mistake when you meant to cancel, you're stuck with that error. Obviously, you could house rule something but the app doesn't cater for Luddites of the highest order.

As your investigators progress through their mission they'll take both physical and horror damage. If they ever receive damage equal to their health or sanity, they get a reset albeit with a new attribute - wounded or insanity. These are game-changing effects which limit your action allowance (wounds) or a player's individual behaviour (insanity). If you do pick up an insane condition you will read the reverse of that card and keep, whatever you've read a secret from the other players. This may change the mission's objectives completely, so your character could, in an effort to help with the new objective, run off into a different map area, leaving the other players behind and bewildered. Although they will know you've picked up an insane condition and could surmise you're still trying to help ...

Once wounded or insane, if your character receives damage or horror again equal to their wounded state, they are eliminated and all surviving players get one more Investigator Phase to finish the game. This is a good mechanism to deal with player elimination. 

On my initial playthroughs, I was often surprised at how well the game flowed, normally I find dungeon crawl type games to be rather clunky. The game designers and app designers have thought long and hard here, about the rules and the app's user interface. This is a very well designed game, in both theme, mechanics and delivery.

This game tells great stories, it almost feels like a role-playing game. In my first game of the introductory scenario (we lost), we were being chased into a dead-end by some flaming, chanting cultists, all the while trying to prevent the fire from engulfing us. This may not be particularly unusual for the Vanderbilt mansion but it's pretty uncommon around these parts. It was easy to imagine the cultists in a trance, immune to the flames blistering their flesh, flickering over their clerical tunics, whilst lurching towards our unwelcome and unfortunate avatars.

It's moments like these, where the game takes on a life/story of its own, that I play board games for. A movie or a book, great in their own right, will always tell the same story, a board game is different on every run-through. Combine that variability with a story-telling game and you've got a highly re-playable custom entertainment experience. 

During the course of your mission, your characters will pick up items, spells and conditions which are all handled by separate decks of cards. These are often double-sided cards whose text will instruct you to flip them and resolve the reverse effect on use. This adds some entropy to the game as, given 5 of the same spell cards, the reverse effect on each is different. After 'tapping' a card, you may be instructed to return the first copy of the card and draw another copy of the same card; the reverse on this second copy will be different. This is a very clever mechanism that changes the way the story unfolds on each play-through. This keeps replay-ability high and each play-through feels different and fresh. You can never be certain that the same spell or item will work as expected. 

I've played the provided scenarios several times, sometimes I encountered different starting areas and different end-game conditions. I was a bit disappointed upon losing my first game that I didn't get a 'cut-scene' on the app. That only seems to happen when your group wins. There was some concern in other game communities around the 'on-rails' story arc you'll be driven down with an app. I didn't find this to be the case at all. You have a plethora of variability between play-throughs. This is affected by character choices, starting equipment and your in-game choices to make each experience different. Even now I would like to go back and replay the first scenario again to see if I have seen it all.

3 of the 4 available expansions; there is another out very soon

The physical base game and app include 4 scenarios. These are all constructed on your table using the 24 double-sided map tiles. The artwork on all the tiles is great, I found it evocative and immersive. You could expand your base game by purchasing 2 DLC missions in the app. If you're still feeling desperate for even more Madness there are also 4 physical expansions available for the game.

I will be more than happy with the base box for some time to come although I can see myself buying the 2 extra scenarios before long. Not because I'm tired of the content in the original scenarios but I want to explore the Mansions of Madness world more, it is that appealing. The base box has an RRP of £92.99 which is a fair chunk of change and an amount that feels a little overpriced for what you're getting. But you'll probably be able to pick it up at your local game store for a little less than that.

But what you are getting for that money, is a brilliant and innovative game whose app-driven mechanic was, and probably is still, the best app-driven board game experience out there. I felt engaged the whole time and it was a pleasure to see those I introduced the game too, after the slight hurdle of rules explanation (not that they're hard), really get immersed into the theme and be invested in their player characters.

Mansions of Madness is a clever and engaging system that will keep you coming back for more because you almost certainly will not complete each mission in your first or even second play-through. Mansions of Madness melds a modern board game with a digital medium so successfully that many others have and are copying the formula. I can only assume that what FFG has started will continue and get more prevalent in the hobby.

Age of Fear 3: The Legend is a turn-based tactical combat game that fully embraces the idea of gameplay over graphics. The developers are up front in admitting that the visuals in their newest title are nothing to get excited about. Instead, they want you to dive into a detailed tactical combat engine in which your opponents are driven by an impressive AI that manages to effectively control hundreds of different unit types, spells, and abilities.

Watch the official trailer to get an idea of how the game looks in motion, and enjoy the..uh..innovative cinematography.

In this game, you can choose to play one of two fairly lengthy campaigns. I've only played partially through them so far, but they are equally interesting takes on the fantasy setting. The first campaign gives you control of a beautiful, but deadly, dryad and an ugly, but very deadly, drider. The drider fellow is like a centaur but with the body of a spider instead of a horse. Nightmare material for sure. These two are forced into a partnership by circumstance, and then go on a wild tear through the countryside building an army to fight whatever gets in their way. The other campaign focuses on a drunken dwarf lord on a rampage of his own. The game has some charmingly silly writing and I laughed more than once at the characters' frequent banter.

The campaign is made up of a series of scenarios that constantly challenge you with new enemies and hazards, with bits of story and dialogue sprinkled in between. After a few missions you will begin to see optional scenarios as well. These can add to the story and give you various bonuses if you complete them. One thing I found really fascinating was that there were occasional missions where losing would actually open up a hidden branch in the story line. I don't want to give any of these away, of course, but just wanted to let any prospective player know not to immediately reload the game when a scenario is going poorly, there might be a fun twist if you hang around.

The combat itself takes place on grid-less battlefields where you are free to move your troops about however you like. Units cannot pass through one another, and the fighting spaces are often crowded, so this means that it is very much an effective tactic to have a line of melee units backed by ranged units, for example. To avoid hindering the mobility of your own units, you'll always want to plan ahead a bit and arrange your own forces to allow for flexibility. A couple of giant ents can really put a hurting on the baddies, but can also clog up your lines, blocking other units from reaching the enemy. Faster units are best kept out on the flanks where they can rapidly close when an opening presents itself. All of this taken together actually gives the gameplay a sort of wargame feel. Frontage and the logistics of moving your troops around the battlefield is equally important to spells and swords.

AoF3 is a game that may look very simple at first glance, but actually gives you a ton of options in how to shape your fighting force to your own style. Between missions you get a chance to recruit new units, buy equipment, and add new abilities to your experienced forces. Two units of the same type can be specialized by buying different upgrades with their experience points. You can even "evolve" some units into a new type, or spend the XP on strengthening what you already have. Attributes like poison/fire/etc resistance, health regeneration, new abilities, or simple attack and defense buffs are among the many options. Your two hero units have tons of choices available, including lots of new abilities to select from. The heroes can also be decked out with various pieces of gear that specialize them even further. Between all of this, a hero unit might have more than a dozen different bonuses and changes that make them unique after just the first few scenarios.

You will need every bonus you can get, since this a game that requires some real tactical effort from the player. Simply sending all of your units forward to engage with the enemy will more often than not lead to disaster. In just about every scenario there is often some sort of tactical adjustment that will need to be made on the player's part in order to win. For example, in an early mission the enemy has several kamikaze plant creatures which will explode into a cloud of poisonous gas if they can hit more than one of your units. However, if you only send one unit forward, the enemy unit will only engage in melee attacks. In another mission an undead alter will continuously summon new units until it is destroyed, making its destruction a much higher priority than defeating the units it sends at you.  Figuring out an approach that will work, and then executing it successfully, is the central part of what makes this game fun. A successful scenario leads to your forces getting bigger and better, and the cycle continues.

One of the things touted by the developers about Age of Fear 3 is the above average enemy AI. I watched out for this in particular as I played the game, and found that it really did do some interesting things. Enemy units exhibit a multitude of behaviors beyond simply charging at you and attacking. Ranged units will try to keep your melee units at a distance, enemies in a hopeless situation will retreat, leaders will hang out behind their lines providing support and then attack furiously once engaged. The AI certainly pulls no punches, as it will at times focus fire on a single unit, and isn't afraid to use area-of-effect attacks when possible.

While playing the game, I did not run into any serious bugs or glitches. The only annoying thing was occasionally having to click twice on something since the first click did not register. Another issue was that the way stat adjustments worked was not always 100% clear or logical. Particularly, I had to learn the hard way that equipping a weapon with a poison bonus would actually lower my chance to hit the enemy at all to practically nothing if said enemy had poison resistance or immunity.

Overall, Age of Fear 3 offers up exactly what it promises. A detailed tactical combat game with simple graphics and sound, but a lot of substance under the hood. It also has fun story lines to follow along with and all sorts of exotic units to choose from.  The game of course won't be everyone's cup of tea, but at least it is very up front about what you are getting. If you are still on the fence, the first two games in the series are quite cheap and offer a fairly similar experience to let you try out the system.

Official Website: http://www.age-of-fear.net/

Age of Fear 3: The Legend can purchased on Steam or directly from the developers on their website.

- Joe Beard

Messerschmitt ME 262 Schwalbe

by

Marek J. Murawski and Marek Rys

 Incredible as it may seem, the earliest design for a jet engine was in 1863 in France. The first patent for a for a jet engine was issued in 1921 to another Frenchman. Frank Whittle took out a patent in 1930. However, the first operational jet engine was patented in Germany in 1935 by Hans Joachim Pabst Von Ohain. The first flight of an aircraft with jet engines took place on 8/27/1939. This was a Heinkel 178 flown by Erich Warsitz. The engineers at Junkers decided to start afresh because of the inherent problems with both Whittle's and Von Ohain's centrifugal designs. They came up with an Axial Turbo Jet engine, the Jumo 004, which is essentially what has been used in all jet aircraft since then.

 The authors start their book on the Me 262 Schwalbe (swallow), by going back in time to the beginning of jet engines. They then go into the thinking and design work that went into the Me 262. The Me 262 was probably the biggest milestone in flight since the Wright brothers. How would you feel, if you were an Allied pilot, to see a plane whiz past you at 100 miles per hour faster than you could fly? The Me 262's maiden flight was on March 29th 1942. The first Jumo motors weren't available until June 1st 1942. After Adolf Gallands first flight in a Me 262 he said "it was as if the angels were pushing you".

 The book continues with all of the design changes, tricycle landing gear, and all of the different armament configurations discussed. The idiotic Fuhrer directive about all aircraft being able to carry a bomb load is brought up. 

 The authors show that the main reason for the delay of the Me 262's deployment was because of the plane and engines being revolutionary. The plane itself was a marvel, but the engines were always its Achilles heel. Acceleration and deceleration had to be slowly and carefully applied or the engines would flame out. The engine's life span was only 10-25 hours. This was due to Germany not being able to produce the exotic alloys needed to deal with the intense heat of a jet engine.

  The book takes us back to Hitler with a very interesting conference about fighter production for the Luftwaffe on Mat 23rd 1944. Hitler wasn't apparently too interested until the Me 262 was mentioned. At that point he asked "how many of the Me 262s already manufactured could carry bombs". When Field Marshal Milch tells him "none" he explodes. Various figures at the meeting try to talk Hitler into the idea that the Me 262 is a fighter through and through. Hitler abuses Adolf Galland and Milch about it. Then Milch blurts out "mein fuhrer, the smallest infant can see that this is a fighter, not a bomber aircraft". I imagine you could hear a pin drop at that moment. 

 By this, the authors show that the Me 262 fighter version was in production, if haltingly, by May 1944. On August 17th 1944 an allied bombing raid on Regensburg caused serious damage to the Me 262 program. Four hundred staff were killed and the facilities were heavily damaged.

 The book continues with a listing of all production and experimental Me 262s. Then it continues with the complete history of all of the Me 262 sorties during this phase of the war. This part of the book takes up the first eighty pages.

 The twenty pages that follow are scaled drawings of every planned or flown Me 262. The next eighty pages are a modeller's and flight simmer's dream. These eighty pages are of computer generated detailed pictures of every single part of a Me 262, from tail to nose and everything in between. The next section is small at fifteen pages, but these are full of pictures of an actual restored Me 262. The last twenty pages are computer renderings of side or top and bottom views of all the different paint schemes, etc.

 Unbelievably, with everything else the book already provides, there are two separate fold out line drawings of the Me 262 one at 1:32 and the other at 1:48 scale. 

 This book is truly a wonder of prose and art. Any and every thing about the Schwalbe is here at the readers fingertips.

Robert

Book: Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe

Authors: Marek J. Murawski and Marek Rys

Publisher: Kagero

Distributor: Casemate Publishers

Marlon Brando in all his glory

I have the pleasure of reviewing The Godfather: Corleone's Empire which, at the time of writing is Cool Mini or Not's latest 'hotness'. Unusually for a miniatures game, this title wasn't a Kickstarter and compared to CMON's other Kickstarter titles it shows. You're not getting hundreds of superfluous miniatures or any add-ons with this game. Instead, you get a game that has been designed to within an inch of its life and that is a good thing.

I suppose we should expect nothing less than a fantastic design when Eric Lang is at the wheel and he has delivered in spades. The top-notch design extends beyond the game play and components to include the box and the vac trays. When I was opening the box it felt like unwrapping a new electronic device whose boxes are notoriously designed to exude luxury and functionality. Godfather's vac trays are among the best I've ever seen in a game. Usually, I will ditch the vac tray and create a custom insert to hold game components, not this time.

The miniatures vac tray, note the horses head first player counter

Godfather's components also include a metal 'suitcase' for each player. I don't know why, but this addition tipped me over from curious to excited to play this game. You'll notice the base of the miniatures is either a square or circle; there are corresponding shapes on the game board which indicates the legal moves for each character. This aid helps to teach and play the game, there are other similar aids on the board to help the different setups at different player counts.

In the game, you control a family and thugs vying for supremacy of New York. The Godfather himself is a rather abstracted figure that only controls the game turns and some aspects of your hand management. Each family aside from the sculpts and names plays exactly the same. The miniatures themselves are, as you would expect from CMON, very well sculpted. But don't be disappointed by the lack of detail on them when compared to a typical fantasy figure; not many mobsters ran around New York bedecked in fur cloaks, leather pouches and scabbards!

A selection of the family figures

When I taught this game to not-my-normal group of players, none of whom would I describe as gamers, it took less than 15 minutes to explain and set-up all the components. (I had packed the game away to make sure setup would be quick but I can't see setup needing more than 10 minutes at the most)

As you can see the box art is sumptuous and evocative of the early 20th-century gangster theme. This immersive art design extends to both the board and the rule book. The rule book is a work of art in more ways than one. Let's be clear here, this is a simple game; if not a gateway game then a very solid next-step game. The rules could have been crammed onto 4 sides of paper. However here you get a lavishly illustrated rule book which introduces the game and explains concepts so clearly, it could be used as an example in rule-book writing.

Revenge is a dish best served cold - said the green player

On my first playthrough of the game, to make sure I knew the rules, I played with my 8-year-old son. For his benefit, I renamed the resource cards from narcotics, liquor, blood-money and weapons to a more palatable medicine, drink, money and guns. I think this may have sanitised my first play-through, a feeling which I haven't shaken on all subsequent plays. I would have liked the actions to feel a little more 'gangster' or brutal.

One of the most enjoyable actions involves taking-out other players figures. When this happens you get to put the proverbial 'concrete shoes' on them and 'give them an offer they can't refuse' and literally toss their miniatures in the Hudson River. The other core actions are spending your resources to complete jobs or shaking down businesses.

In order to maximise your turns, you need to manage your family. With no figures left you're not able to complete any of the ancillary actions open to you. This is a similar mechanic to managing your rage in Eric's previous Viking-themed game Blood Rage.

There are four turns to every game with five phases per turn. It scales well from 2 to 5 players. At 2 and 3 players, however, the board did feel quite barren until the 4th turn where you receive your full complement of miniatures. With 5 players the final turn felt inordinately longer than the preceding ones.

The final act of a 3 player game

Ultimately this is a worker placement game, with a side of card-drafting in an attempt to control Manhattan and Brooklyn. Where you place your pieces doesn't induce the same level of angst in the other players as do the likes of Caylus or Agricola. It felt like there was nearly always an okay, if not a good option left to take. However, for its audience, I think this is a design feature; very few players will find themselves alienated or picked on at any stage.

When I played the game with my slightly-more experienced group, they all agreed that it had become one of their favourite games and would look forward to playing it again. We rarely get the same games to the table but I think the Godfather will be a regular and welcome visitor to my gaming table now. This game feels a little light for my tastes but I still thoroughly enjoyed it and it was definitely a hit with my core gaming group. 

I would like to thank 365games for the copy of Godfather: Corleone's Empire they've provided for this review. RRP for this game is £79.99.