The Mansion Incident: Let's Talk About It

You awake alone...

The last thing you remember is the helicopter spinning out of control.  

You, and your entire unit, were thrown from it as you approached the Stepford Estate, deep in the forested mountains.

You’d come to investigate a slew of missing persons. Now your team counts among them.  

Something ravenous approaches from the dark. You stand, but there is only one place to run…  

Inside.   

Those are the opening lines of Travis Brightfield's solo, mansion-crawling RPG, The Mansion Incident.

In this game, you play as a member of an elite investigative unit now trapped inside a mansion of horrors somewhere in the wilderness. You must navigate the maze-like mansion while overcoming deadly, experimental monsters, trapped rooms and strange puzzles. You must find the rest of your team all while being pursued by a horrible creature called the Nemesis. Can you survive the mansion and escape or will you and your team perish under the pressure of the horrors within?

To play, all you need is a deck of playing cards (with the Jokers), a d6, something to journal with and keep track of your character, and some tokens (coins, beads) to place on cards to mark important spots in the mansion. You will also need a large surface on which to play. In my game, I ended up using 46 cards from the deck so imagine how much space that would take up. I didn't have the space to play physically so I utilized Tabletop Simulator to help me facilitate the play.

Player Character

The game features four archetypes for you to chose for your character: The Seasoned, The Prodigy, The Hot Shot, and The Brainiac. Each archetype has a skill that will assist it when navigating the mansion or fighting monsters. New skills can be gained by finding your lost team members.

Every character has 4 tokens of health. For an easier game, each token represents 2 damage, but for a difficult game each token represents only 1 damage. I chose the easier path for my playthrough.

Characters also have 4 slots of inventory space. Items can stack up to 3 times in one slot and if a new item granted that the character wants to keep, then they will have to drop a different item if they don't have any empty slots. Dropped items are gone forever, therefore, inventory management is important as players will need to decide what items benefit their characters the most.

Characters also can gain Research by discovering clues in certain rooms. Research items are powerful as they do not take inventory space while granting bonuses to overcoming obstacles and monsters in the mansion.

Finally, characters have memories. These are your journal entries and are gained by prompts that are asked when certain areas are explored or when team members are rescued. These memories may be used as "Grit" by crossing out two of them to be able to re-roll any die. The player may then incorporate how these memories helped them overcome a challenge.

Cards and Challenges

Challenges include monsters, puzzles, traps, and Big Bads. Monsters, puzzles, and traps are overcome through the use of items or by a die roll which may be enhanced by skills, items, or research. There are 6 Big Bads in the game, represented by the face cards of black suits in the deck of cards. These named monsters have more health points but drop very useful items if they are defeated.

Each card represents one room or area in the game and the challenge or secrets associated it. Once a room has been cleared, a die roll determines the exits of that room and therefore the pattern of cards that will be placed face down around it. This can lead to dead ends and cause the character to have to backtrack to another unexplored location.

This backtracking is a problem because the Nemesis will consistently follow the character around the mansion; staying one card behind the player. Backtracking will usually result in a confrontation with the Nemesis, which can't be defeated unless you character finds The Beloved team member. Flipping the black joker on the board also initiates a confrontation with the Nemesis.

In order to win the game, a player must locate all 6 team members in the mansion then find the red joker. Defeating the Nemesis is not required for victory but it will remove the Nemesis from the board for a while which makes backtracking much less dangerous.

This mansion had a lot of rooms in my playthrough

I managed to win on my first playthrough but I think I got really lucky with finding very useful research in the first few rooms which help me overcome the first couple of Big Bads. Then I quickly located 3 of the team members which gave some me some Skills to push further into the game. After defeating the Nemesis, it all came down to finding the red joker and I happened to follow the correct path to find it. I actually think I misplayed the team member cards because I think I was supposed to remove them from the board after locating them. That mistake may have also contributed to me winning.

Things I Liked

• The card mechanics for traversing the mansion. Each of the rooms felt unique during the playthrough because they are unique. Every card has it's own description, while some other solo card crawls will lump them together by value or suit and therefore become repetitive. 
• Management of inventory is a nice touch because it makes those inventory decisions important. Choosing to carry the wrong items may inhibit the character in the future.
• Memories are nice touch. The game itself feels like any basic dungeon crawl; explore room, fight stuff, find stuff. However, memories add a little bit of narrative heft to the character. Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to use the memories for a reroll though.
• I love that the Nemesis follows the character around throughout the early game. It does ramp up the tension when checking for doors because you are hoping it is not a dead end and have to face the Nemesis on a backtrack

Things I Think Could be Better

• When discovering certain team members, the description will say you meet in the Foyer but your character may be very far from the Foyer (the entrance to the mansion) and it is not explained whether this actually moves your character back to the Foyer or if it is just narrative fluff. (This is really to only issue I noticed while playing and it's minor)

Final Thoughts

Overall, I found The Mansion Incident to be an enjoyable experience and a well-designed system for a dungeon/mansion crawl. Travis Brightfield put a lot of work into describing each location and giving them all a unique feel. The prompts and memories system truly pulls forward a humanistic aspect from the character with how they connect with and feel about their teammates. This adds an emotional layer to a game that would otherwise feel like a basic hack-and-slash video game. I highly recommend this game to you dungeon crawl solo enthusiasts out there.

The Mansion is available at itch.io for pay-what-you-want.