Mad Love Review – An Eldritch Game That Won’t Ruin Your Relationship

Disclaimer: Mad Love was provided for free by Imp House Game Company, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Let’s talk about Mad Love. Not the wonderful Harley Quinn comic, or the Sean Paul and David Guetta song. But the two-player board game of memory and madness.

Before we begin, it’d be wise to sprinkle salt along your door frames and adorn your favourite blood-soaked robes. Because things are going to get a little eldritch-y.

Mad Love is a game of limited communication. So after setting up the game, there’s no talking allowed. To start playing, you and your partner draw two cards from your decks, memorise them and then place them face down. Creating a 2×2 grid in the middle of the table, now known as the Dreamscape.

You then take turns pushing face-down cards into this Dreamscape.

You can either push a column so that a card falls out of the Dreamscape into your partner’s lap. Forcing them to flip the card, carry out the action, before adding that card to their hand.

Alternatively, you can push a row. Doing so slides a card horizontally out of the Dreamscape. This pushed-out card goes straight into your partner’s discard pile. They then draw a new card from their deck face-up, carrying out its action before adding it to their hand.

As these cards carry out their actions they’ll give you love, madness, or just make a mess of the Dreamscape.

Be careful not to take on too much madness. As taking on too much will lose you the game, and possibly sacrifice yourself and a loved one to an eldritch. However, if you find enough love to fill your love meter. Then not only will you win the game, but maybe – just maybe – you’ll satiate Cthulhu enough to live to see another sunrise.

Staying sane in the face of madness

From the moment Mad Love enters your line of sight, you’ll notice the artwork. It’s spectacular. Managing to capture the playfulness of a board game, as disturbing and grotesqueness of eldritch undescribables. It’s high praise, but it reminds me of Mike Mignola’s Doom That Came to Gotham.

On the gameplay side, Mad Love is all about working together with your partner to set up the Dreamscape for love. A combination of getting the right cards into the 2×2 grid, and ensuring you remember where they are.

Memory is a large aspect of the game, but with only a couple of cards to remember it’s not too hard to manage. It does lead to some fun moments when your mind blanks, and you make a mistake. However, these moments aren’t as frequent as they need to be.

As such Mad Love is much too easy.

Compared to other communication games like The Crew: Mission Deep Sea, or Hanabi, where you need to establish codes and communication lines. Mad Love is a walk in the park. We won five of our seven games, and the only times we lost were due to extreme unluckiness.

When Mad Love challenges you, it’s a lot of fun. It becomes more than a memory game, letting you use some deduction and hypothesize about different scenarios happening. This then turns into moments of apprehension when all your thinking is done, and the only action left to do is cross your fingers and hope you don’t push or dismiss the wrong card.

Unfortunately, this challenge only happens at the start of the game. After that, there isn’t enough chaos or confusion to challenge you or your memory. Only the Ghast cards, which randomize the Dreamscape, force you into this exciting uncertainty. However, with two in the deck, they rarely crop up and aren’t a big influence on the game.

Perfect for date night, or summoning Cthulhu

Mad Love’s simplicity isn’t a terrible thing, as it’s kind of an intimate experience. After a few quick games, you start to understand your partner in a way where words no longer matter.

This makes Mad Love the perfect date game. Ideal for when you don’t want to crush your partner’s spirits in Santorini or start your relationship off by lying in Cockroach Poker.

Otherwise, Mad Love is missing a couple of improvements from modern board games. For one, it could benefit from player information cards. Or at least somewhere that lets you know how many of each card is in the deck. Love Letter uses this to great effect, allowing you to deduce what cards are still in play.

Overall, if you can get passed the ease in difficulty, Mad Love is cheap, quick and has excellent portability. It has some fun moments, where memory and deduction collide. But these moments are few and far between. With the Dreamscape being so stable the puzzle becomes solvable in an instant.