Mystery Mansion (board game)

Mystery Mansion is the name of a series of board games in which players search furniture and other objects inside a mansion to locate a hidden treasure or stash of money.

The first version of the game was released by the Milton Bradley Company in 1984, the same year when Hasbro took over that company. Instead of a standard game board, the original Mystery Mansion features a modular board where players build the mansion by adding new rooms drawn at random.

Hasbro then released an electronic talking version under its Parker Brothers brand in the 1990s. In this version, game play is guided by a computerized talking "electronic organizer", providing clues and other information to players during each game. Also, the modular board design was scrapped in favor of a fixed board, loosely similar to the one for Cluedo. However, the content in each varied from each game.

The original Mystery Mansion featured a modular board consisting 24 cardboard tiles representing different rooms in the mansion: 8 First Floor rooms, 8 Second Floor rooms, and 8 rooms in the cellar. Each room has different doors and objects that come into play during the game. The Foyer is positioned face up as the starting room of the game; all the other rooms are shuffled face down and set to the side. A card representing the mansion's outside front door entrance is then placed next to Foyer so that the staircase leads up to the double doors of the Foyer. Those double doors are the only way out of the mansion.

Each player is represented by one of the 4 plastic pawns, and they are placed on the front door entrance card at the start of the game.

Also before the game, 7 cardboard treasure tokens (2 representing the "real treasure", and 5 representing cobwebs or the "fake treasure") are randomly placed in one of the 7 plastic treasure chests. Each treasure chest has a label on its bottom with two numbers on it, representing the two keys that will unlock it (see below). The treasure chests are then mixed up so no player knows which two have the real treasure, or knows which keys will open those two real treasures.

Other items include:

Players take turns in order, with the initial player determined by a consensus before the game. During a turn, a player takes 3 "actions". An action can be one of the following:

Once a player successfully moves his/her claimed treasure chest outside the mansion, (s)he can now open it. Before opening it, the player must show the other opponents both the numbers on the bottom of chest and the key card that unlocks it for verification. If it is one of the two "real" treasures, then (s)he wins. If it is one of the false treasures, that chest is then put out play and the player must head back inside the mansion.

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Wikipedia