Imagine yourself sitting on a plane. Players have to cooperate to reach the top of the Mountain and then escape safely, but the Mountain has more than one trick up its ghastly sleeve. In horror, you realize that the higher you fly, the crazier your teammates become!
Mountains of Madness is a cooperative game for 2-5 players, designed by Rob Daviau and published by Iello Games. The game retails for $39.99, which is pretty good considering the components (which includes a fully painted airplane miniature) are amazing.
In Mountains of Madness, you play as investigators searching for relics of ancient origin. Such relics, however, contain Eldritch secrets, which we cannot hope to comprehend. As you collect these objects, your mind will play tricks on you. This leads to another element to this game. It is categorized as a party game. At first this put me off, but once I learned how the game actually played I was all in. Plus the game features a subtle Lovecraftian theme. Who doesn’t love them some Cthulhu?
When you take a relic card, you also receive a Madness card which has a rule you have to obey without saying what it is while the timer is counting down during the puzzle phase. You have to work together to solve the puzzles by playing just enough supplies without playing too few or too many. Some puzzles required a specific amount of Weapons, Books, Crates, or Tools. Your cards will have 2-7 of these supplies but you can earn 10’s of any of the “suits” in order to make passing the challenges much easier. Any failures will either cause injuries, loss of leadership tokens, or make your Madness cards even worse.
I don’t want to spoil too many of the Madness cards as that is the fun in Mountains of Madness. One such card for instance, requires you to look under the table for something before you play cards, and one has you speak without saying numbers. There are so many different ones, you will likely have a different game play experience each time this hits the table.
Since you are working together to play the right cards, the Madness cards can severely hinder your ability to communicate. Some of the Madness cards are more detrimental than others. So don’t get too discouraged by a few failed challenges. Each time my group has played, we were dying from laughter. I wasn’t prepared for how much fun this game would be. And the difficulty is pretty average as we have won about as often as we have lost.
So if you like group activity with team building exercises and a side of chaos then this game is for you.
