Mansions of Madness: Streets of Arkham
(Astral Alchemy)
Not sure what to make of this. I blow pretty hot and cold on MoM.
The scenario itself is pretty good - some of the new cards and statuses are quite interesting. This xpac also brought in the "improve" mechanic which allows you upgrade your stats (this scenario apparently is to show that off and it happened a lot
)
But it's a difficulty 4/5. Which meant we failed. We had to gather 4 component for someone in a time limit - but we didn't know where in the setting they were.
We felt quite efficient (as much as you could be going in blind) but only found 3 (and only got 1 back in time). The game was telling us there's time pressure, we're running out of time etc, but there was nothing we could do to speed up. Even when we found the items we couldn't move them back to to the target any quicker...
And then everyone died in a damp squib of an ending as we ran out of time (we'd have got progress next turn) with nothing we could have done to be quicker for last few rounds (particularly as the games warnings ramped up) - we didn't even get to "phase 2" of the scenario...
It's a standard MoM problem that if you don't act efficiently you run out of time - but felt particularly bad here. A second play through with some hints/tips on where to go might help, but feels like you shouldn't need that to have a chance. I've failed others and with hindsight it felt like we made bad choices based on information we had, this was just we didn't pick the right options to get to our objectives quickly - with no info to help us make the right choices.
A real sour note to end of decent evening