5

I've only played a couple games so I know my experience could be faulty and I'm definitely comparing Mansions of Madness to Arkham Horror where loss of sanity and loss on health are roughly equivalent.

That said, as the keeper player I haven't found causing a player to go Insane to be very effective. The ability to play a trauma card as a keeper action doesn't seem very strong. By the time you've driven someone insane, it is late in the game and Threat is at a premium. I haven't been able to get enough Insanity Trauma cards to take advantage of the Insane person.

How can I better take advantage of an Insane Investigator?

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2

In at least scenario 2 mythos and trauma cards are pretty cheap. For 1 threat you get 1 mythos or 1 trauma card per cultist. Playing the trauma card is in itself free. In my last game the keeper managed to get my insane investigator to run 3 spaces into one of her monsters who at once took a sample and ran through a locked door I couldn't follow. This ended up being probably the most important move in the game. I forced the investigators to go from passive to aggressive to stop the keeper from getting her last sample.

So while the use will depend on the luck of the draw a well placed trauma card can change the course of the game. Many of the low insanity cards are really not nice. In a game where your objective is to kill the investigators you could get lucky and draw "final solution" and simply make the investigator kill themselves or the card that makes the investigator attack one of his friends.

In a couple of the scenarios you get trauma at the same time as you get mythos. This is a way to get some use out of them.

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  • Actually, I read that card last night as *...draw one mythos or trauma card per cultist..." - One of my players used a power to force me to throw out my hand and I never had 4 of them again until the endgame. – gomad May 10 '11 at 17:01
  • You are right. It's "Or" on that card, I'm going to edit my text. Still when I played that scenario with 4 players last I always lots of cultist out. I could easily produce more mythos cards than I had use for during a round. The surplus whent to trauma in my case. My players during that game though had an tendancy to roll 1 all the time... – Skadlig May 11 '11 at 6:38
  • Did you use "Summon Worshippers" more than once per turn? I didn't get the impression you could do that. Between the tommy-gun-toting Investigator and my use of "Summoning" to swap cultists for bigger monsters, I never had many cultists out at one time. – gomad May 11 '11 at 20:45
  • Keeper actions that are usable once per (turn/character/what have you) seem to explicitly say so. – tunaranch May 12 '11 at 8:43
  • @gomad, @tunaranch had to check the cards. Summon Worshipper says "Place a cultist in a space containing an altar". So for 1 threat you get to place 1 cultist. It doesn't say anything about once per turn as for instance Take sample does. "Summoning" doesn't say it explicitly but I would guess you only get 1 monster per 3 threat. But as with Summon Whorshippers you could use it multiple times per turn. – Skadlig May 12 '11 at 17:25

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