If the total value of each required equipment type equals or falls within the given range of numbers, then the challenge was a success. My biggest gripe about Mountains of Madness is how overproduced it is for what is primarily a game centered around the madness cards. If the total value is higher or lower than the required number of range of numbers, then it was a failure. Once everything’s in place, you’ll draw a number of Equipment and Madness cards depending on how many potential lunatics are playing.

Leadership tokens are a limited currency used to earn additional communication time, rerolling the penalty die, and resting. In this game you’ll be trying to figure out the best route to take, minimizing the hazards as best as possible. I hate to prematurely purge a brand new game from our collection but I don't want to hold onto something just for the sake of sunk costs.Review Mountains of Madness puts players in the middle of an existential crisis that not only puts the team cautiously at odds with one another, but also creates the possibility of both danger and fatality. So you have to plan ahead for this - rest too much and you burn through your leadership tokens; rest too few times and you'll not have enough cards to pass tests. At this time, the Leader reveals all of the cards placed on the Sled board, comparing them to the Challenge tile and the values for each type of equipment needed. Now what makes this part crazy is you cannot describe to your teammates anything about the value of the cards you're playing.

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.Since a cooperative game normally hinges upon the successful communication of information between players, this presents a distracting and, at times, off-putting hurdle to victory, making this one of the more difficult cooperative games I’ve played. A scoreboard tells you how well you performed – or perhaps better said, how much horror you avoided.

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. The Leadership tokens are thick plastic pieces that have what appears to be a screen printed design on them. And while it is certainly possible to shoot straight up the mountain, generally it is best to meander around to try to pick up some relics. I'm kind of big into heavier games that still manage to bring in a social element, and this game does that in strides.In some ways the game feels like one of those social deduction games like Werewolf, but it also has some of the same tenseness and feeling of games like Dead of Winter or The Thing Infection at Outpost 31. 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. During each phase, the leader of the team - which rotates each turn - can spend "leadership tokens" to affect the game in different ways.