AToE vs Mansions of Madness

[mqstout]

ATOE: Better as a competitive game than a cooperative game.
MoM: Strictly a cooperative game.

ATOE: Decent chance of anyone winning.
MoM: (especially with expansions) the keeper wins, the heroes lose, most of the time unless they exploit a cheese tactic. ("For the Cthonic feel.")

ATOE: Colonial setting.
MoM: Early 20th Century setting.

ATOE: Easier to broaden the theme and feeling.
MoM: Fixed in the Cthonic.

ATOE: Far easier to mod/custom than MoM (except... fixed board)
MoM: Difficult to make custom cards (many double side cards and different card sizes) and each scenario requires a good bit of content -- but the board is itself made of modular pieces to lay out.

ATOE: The villain is scripted.
MoM: The villain is a player.

ATOE: Almost each time you search/interact, something happens.
MoM: A lot of search results will be "nothing of interest".

ATOE: Much broader cast of characters. Each character is quite varied.
MoM: Small cast of characters who seem to stagnate faster (depending on what items you get during play), despite each character having a few permutations.

ATOE takes a bit longer than MoM to play; though setting up MoM takes far longer.

Overall, I do like both. They do play quite differently though. MoM is frantic and usually requires you not to deviate from the path. ATOE builds tension over time and rewards exploration. I prefer ATOE.

(08-23-2012 08:10 PM)wisdomknight Wrote:  I can only afford one. I will be playing with 5 people (incluing my 3 teen kids). My two girls seem a bit bored with LNoE as the combat is taking way too long and really drags the excitement of the game down.

Combat in ATOE can take even longer than LNOE -- especially when battling the big bad. But each side is often rolling a whole handful of dice, which can be exhilarating. Combat in MoM is funky and uses a unified mechanic with other actions, but requires repeated card drawing. That said, combat is rarer in MoM. For many characters and scenarios, if you're needing combat, you're playing wrong.

As a side note, both games have strong female protagonists that might be good for the teenage girls.

How are your kids with reading and comprehension? MoM has a pretty strong component of that (verbal clues in the story blurbs) that's quite important to successful play. Depending on ages (you say only "teen"), MoM contains a bit more a mature content.

The rules, I would say, are easier and more straightforward in MoM than ATOE --if that is a concern.