This makes it especially funny when one player is completely silent and not responding to anything you're saying, until you say in jest looking at his character card, "This Danforth guy is a jerk", and he yells out "FINALLY I CAN SPEAK YOU FOOLS! No one was particularly excited about having to follow the silly rules (someone had the rule that they had to sing everything and they really hated it) and it just seemed sort of meh.

Also, madness only really applies during the encounter phase, which seems like a miss by the designers. Successfully meeting any one of the requirements will yield the bonus shown on the token (for example a specimen, or an opportunity to heal an injury) whilst any failure will result in one of the players (chosen by the leader) having to take a madness card.

Once the Leader decides not to use any more Leadership tokens and the sand timer has run out, play continues on to the next phase. They will have to work together to not only survive the harsh weather and rugged terrain of the mountain but also the attacks on their very sanity. Once players are ready they may play Equipment and/or injury cards by placing them face down onto the Sled board. As I grabbed axes and pitons from our sled, my already unhinged companions descended deeper into complete lunacy. Failing a challenge means a player chosen by the Leader either draws the next level of Madness card (going all the way to level three and getting more disruptive each time), or rolls the Penalty die.

Players are then able to play cards from their hand face down onto the Sled board until the sand timer runs out. 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 the end of the game if you have more relic cards than injuries, your expedition was a success and you win the game.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. The team also flips over the timer and has 30 seconds to determine which cards should be played and by whom to complete the challenge. You can always pull the worst cards (I’m not a huge fan of the face-petting one myself), and a few blank cards are thrown in so you can make up your own.

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. Relics give players increasingly more mad looking madness cards, and give scrambled, garbled, and text-covered tiles to place over the corresponding abilities. In fact, what convinced me to try it out in the first place was my friend describing it as a “Lovecraftian party game” – and while it has a bit more complexity than your average party game, the descriptor is not far off.Regardless of whether the Leader chooses to use the Rest option or not, the players check to see if the Airplane is on the third Escape tile. The objective of the game is to reach the top of the mountain whilst both avoiding injury and simultaneously collecting relic cards. At least one person also must be willing to be ‘that guy’ and rules-lawyer discarding Leadership tokens as appropriate, which can drain the fun from a game quickly, or if no one’s willing to do it then make the game quite trivial. And because no one else knows how you're mad, and you have no clue what they're mad with, it all kind of just cascades into chaos by the end of the game. While so many other Lovecraftian games ( Eldritch Horror, Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition) invent thrilling adventure and craft stories of survival, none of them capture the threads of insanity that H.