How to organise Mansions of Madness

Cards and tokens

gaming modules

I've been playing a lot of Mansions of Madness lately, and I've noticed that I spend way too much time sorting through game assets. A character gains a clue, and I grab the container of interaction tokens instead. A character uses a spell and has to draw a new one, and I grab the Conditions deck instead. There's a special item in the room, and I grab the insanity deck by mistake. I must spend 20 minutes out of an hour just juggling decks and tokens. But after 3 years of play, the correct organisation scheme has finally occurred to me, and it's made a world of difference. I'm explaining it here, just in case you're struggling with all the assets in the game.

Things and ideas

Some cards and tokens represent things or ideas that a character can gain. These are usually physical objects or currency (such as clues or evidence). Well, this is Mansions of Madness so even positive things can sometimes be harmful, but These are:

  • Common Items deck
  • Unique Items deck
  • Spell deck
  • Clue (and keys, from an expansion set) tokens

Place those 4 asset types in one area of your gaming table. Any time the game tells you to gain an item, spell, or clue, that's the pool of assets you draw from.

Conditions and penalties

Some items represent conditions and penalties that are usually imposed upon a character, willing or otherwise:

  • Horror deck
  • Damage deck
  • Condiition

Because these get used so frequently, I also include assets that help build the board:

  • Search/Interact tokens
  • Explore/Sight tokens
  • Wall, Door, Barricade, Secret Passage tiles
  • ID tokens

Group these assets together in an area of your gaming table apart from your other assets. When you're setting up a new room, or your character has been afflicted (or benefits from a positive condition, like Focused or Fearless), this is the place you reach for.

Infrequent components

Finally, there are some tokens that don't get used consistently:

  • Person tokens
  • Fire tokens
  • Special tokens from expansions

Group these assets in a third area of your gaming table, and bring them out as needed.

Muscle memory

Sort your assets this way, and within a single gaming session you develop muscle memory and visual recognition of which area holds what broad type of component. Sure, I still might grab the Search/Interact tokens instead of the Explore/Sight tokens, but that's partly because I keep them in near-identical containers. Even when I do, switching to the correct container is a matter of just picking up the other similar container instead of also picking up the clue tokens and the person tokens and the fire tokens, and so on until I get lucky and pick the right one.

Seeing the assets in 3 distinct sets also makes the game setup in general feel less intimidating. Yes, there are a lot of assets, but a big, impenetrable, all-inclusive pile is greater than the sum of its parts. Split them into smaller categories and you trick your brain into believing there are only a few assets to keep track of. Next time you play Mansions of Madness, give it a try.

Header photo by m wrona on Unsplash

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