Betrayal at House on the Hill Review (Avalon Hill Games)
Since the New Year, I’ve made it my goal to cull the game collection. Far too many games just sit on shelves doing nothing but mock me. They just sit there taking up thousands of times more space than the handful of sawbucks I spent on it. Unpunched counters full of promise and unrealized potential. For the past five years I was bit by the bug known as “Cult of the New”. Symptoms include massive stockpiling of boardgames, reading rules and feeling like you know enough about the game to “review” it and nightime reading material being Avalon Hill rulebooks for games that I’ll realistically never play. The main symptom though is buying more games than you actually play (at like a two new games for every one game played ratio). Being afflicted for the past five years has really done a number on both my wallet and storage space.
One of the early round of purges found Betrayal at House on the Hill (Betrayal) in a box (realize that for me, I’m slow at moving stuff out the door so purging involves placing items in boxes and sitting on them until the “time is right”). One of the hardest things for a person like me, whose worth is fully defined by the number of games on the shelves, is parting with the cardboard and ink thinking: “But what happens if I find myself abducted by aliens (five to be exact) and I find myself needing a six person game with no language dependency and rules that can be explained in body jesters? This would be the perfect game for this situation.” And every so often you do find yourself in that perfect situation pining for the game that left you some time back and last night was one of those cases. Lucky for me though, the host last night had a copy of the game and mine was still in the “processing” stage.
Betrayal is a game where a group of people somehow find themselves inside of a haunted mansion without any clue and to quote Dylan they “had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down”. What unfolds in front of the players feels right at home as a Twilight Zone or B-Movie script. Blobs, witches, aliens and poltergeists are about. What makes Betrayal unique though, is that players do not have any idea what exact story is about to happen. When players first start off, they are placed in the main entryway to the mansion and are left to explore. Players have the option of selecting a handful of pre-set characters with each character having two different stat lines to choose from. A player’s stats represent physical attributes, Might and Speed, and mental attributes, Knowledge and Sanity. During the course of the game encounters and items will raise or lower stats depending reactions from your character to events like seeing your dead grandma crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.
During a players turn they are able to move as many rooms as their movement stat allows and explore. To explore a room a player moves to a doorway and flips over the next tile that is allowed on the particular floor they are on. On the backs of room tiles the words Upper, Middle and Basement are printed on there and if the floor is highlighted then that room is valid for that floor. Once a room is revealed often there will be special text which has to be resolved which could cause a portion of the building to become inaccessible for a time or cause damage to you as you fall thru floors. Also many rooms have a symbol printed onto them which corresponds to three different types of cards: Events, Omens and Items. If a room is revealed for the first time, at the end of a player’s turn they read and perform the actions printed on the card.
Items represent helpful things that will often aid a player in the game and you usually want as many of those as possible. Events are a mixture of things often requiring a skill check and success or failure will determine if your character receives or loses stats. Omens are usually mystical type items which aid you in your quest to make it out of the mansion alive and also act as the trigger mechanic to get the haunt going. Each time an Omen card is drawn, that player rolls six special dice and if the roll is less than the number of Omen cards than the haunt is triggered.
Here is where the game’s narrative really comes into play. Depending on what the Omen card was that triggered the haunt as well as the room that it was discovered in determines what the haunt is for this game. What happens during the haunt is one of the players becomes a traitor. Evil possesses them and they become hell-bent on making sure the rest of the group doesn’t make it out of the mansion. The traitor is often helped by the aforementioned aliens, monsters, plants, witches and whatever horrors you can think of. The rest of the players attempt to stop whatever is happening or get out of the house.
The atmosphere to this game is ever present. Character text on the cards and the stories and details involved with the haunts creates an exciting and thematic experience.
All can’t be sugar and spice and everything nice though and Betrayal does have its flaws. First off, the game was published by the mega-corp Hasbro/Avalon Hill. Working on such a larger scale, compared to hobby game publishers, combined with the 40 some odd haunts that may happen, play testing fell a little short. Proof of this can be found on the Avalon Hill website where you can download the pages upon pages of revisions and updates detailing how to resolve interactions within a game that has so many variables. Now the follow I’ll admit aren’t statements of facts, just observations that I’ve made. Part of the fun with a narrative game like this is going into an unknown situation and somehow rising up against the odds and the image of a worn, battered and bruised group of protagonists fall out of the building at the end of the movie exhausted, but alive. My personal experience is nine times out of ten, you’ll get your arse handed to you by the haunt. So many stars have to align to be successful the first time around that for me it just feels futile…And when playing a game it is not a good feeling to have when you think the only time you’ll win is if you’re the traitor.
This next thing I’m not going to classify as a negative or a positive, it just is what it is. This game requires a lot of tokens. And I mean a lot. The catch is you’ll use less than a score during a particular game. So when an event card appears creating a passage between rooms, you need efficient organization (or a good memory) to quickly find tokens to get you back to gaming. Again though, these do wonders to create a feel and setting for the game, but sometimes the massive number become nothing more than speed bumps disrupting the flow of the game.
Now here we are, less than twelve hours after completing another game of Betrayal…And yet somehow I feel different than before. This game was put into a box shortly after New Years. My copy is still relatively unpunched and new. Prices are still double what I paid for the game and everything says that I should stick with my gut and keep it boxed and use it as trade bait or sell for beer money. Last night though, Betrayal tied a string to me and it wants me to keep it around. The game feels like a drinking buddy I had back in college. On a day to day basis this guy I could take or leave. In social settings he was a “one-upper”…The type of person that had to have attention drawn to him when people are talking so he’ll take whatever topic at hand, develop some fucked up mental connection between the conversation at hand (the social and economic impact Steve Bartman had on the city of Chicago by costing the Cubs a sure fire NL Pennant and World Series trophy) and what he wants to talk about (his lone testicle)…I guess they use one ball in baseball at a time and he can only use one ball at a time so I guess I see the connection.
So in spite of his social faux pas he is entertaining when getting drunk and yeah at times you’re uncomfortable and don’t want to be seen by him and other times he’s got you rolling on the ground and always towards the end of the night he’s bought you three or four shots. And looking back on what I remember of some of those drunken nights (the bits I remember) are great and memorable moments – every single one because it was a group of people getting together and having fun (even if some people’s fun differs from yours). Betrayal is much like this. It has problems and it isn’t great but it has charm. At times there is frustration as rule contradictions pop up and disputes arise, but that’s part of the negative of having character.
Many times I pine for the days of my youth where a game was a game and a way to socialize: A way for people to gather together and share in a memory with the connecting thread for all the interaction being the game. Betrayal is an interesting beast. In terms of gameplay Betrayal feels lacking at times where the basic mechanics are easy but the parts that make it a “game” sometimes fall short. For the thematic elements and a story that everyone can get into, this game delivers in spades. Let me close with this:
To my lovely Betrayal at House on the Hill,
I have turned my back and sworn you off prematurely. You have many things to offer which until recently I was blind to. For all the fun we had, I was too superficial and judged too harshly on minor physical appearances and ignored the heart and soul that you offered. Hopefully once I pull you out of The Box I wrongly stuffed you in, you’ll take me back.
Rating: 3 out of 5
‘Till Next Time - Happy Gaming
LvT
