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The winds howl and thunder strikes as Boardnado revists yet another game! This time we're locked inside our worst nightmares as our friendly Outpost reviewer plays the horror game 'Betrayal at House on the Hill'.
He even has some new ideas on how to make it more accessible for new players so it's definitely worth a read!
It is a stormy Friday night and you have been invited to a game night with some friends. Strangely though it isn't at the usual place (Outpost of course), but rather some way off in the country in a lonely and derelict house. When you get there the car engine sputters and dies and you thank the heavens it didn't happen on the road. All your friends are already there, but nobody can remember who sent the invitation or why they came to this desolate place. One of your comrades complains that she's cold and so you all seek shelter inside the house from the shearing, howling wind.
Once inside the doors slam shut behind you and everything becomes eerily quiet .... You realise you've walked right into a B-horror movie! Oh bother!
Betrayal at House on the Hill (or 'Betrayal' for short) is probably the best invention since the wheel. It is highly popular among my friends and they won't have me leave the house without it. So I take it to work every day.
I'm kidding of course. Sort of.
HOW TO PLAY
You set up the game by placing the basement, entrance hall and upper floor tile spread out in the middle. Then you sort the three decks into their respective categories of Omens, Items and Events.
Each player takes a double-sided character board and picks one of two characters on it. Then they take the corresponding colour miniature and place it in the entrance hall (where we left our story, right after the door shut behind them). Clips are placed on the appropiate values of Strength, Speed, Sanity or Knowledge on your character board. These are your start attributes and they can decrease or increase over the course of the game. Should either Knowledge or Sanity fall to zero you are considered insane. The same for Strength and Speed, if they reach zero you are 'dead'.
You'll notice that the house tiles all have little doors painted on the sides. Each turn you may move the same amount of tiles as your speed stat and when you 'enter' a door you take a tile from the deck with the corresponding floor printed on it and match it up to the door of the previous tile. This means you never know what is in the next room and the house will look different every single time you play it. Pretty neat huh?
There are a few things about the house that stay the same though. The basement is always inaccessible at the start of the game and if you end up there (due to an event or falling through a trap door or the collapsed room) you have to find your way out. Things also gradually get worse depending on which floor you're in. The ground floor is pretty horrible, the first floor is downright dreadful and the basement is like OMG WHY DID I EVER COME DOWN HERE!Whenever you end up on a house tile with an omen, item or event symbol all movement stops and something will happen to you. If it's an event it's usually something spooky where you need to roll the doom dice to get out of a situation and perhaps gain or lose attributes. If it's an item or an omen you always get a (useful?) something to help you in your adventures.
Beware though! Omens are indicators of dark forces arrayed against your party and each time you encounter one you must roll 6 dice to reveal The Haunt! "Screams" "Creepy music plays"
When you roll for the haunt you must roll a number higher or equal than the number of omen cards on the table. When you do the haunt is delayed until you encounter another omen card at which point you roll again. You'll quickly notice that at first it's pretty easy to avoid the haunt, but after more and more omens are revealed it becomes increasingly difficult and eventually it will happen!
When it does phase two of the game begins and this is where things get REALLY interesting. Turns out one of your players is a traitor! This foul fiend is set on unleashing some kind of dark horror on your party and will murder you all if he or she has the chance. At this point in the game it kind of becomes impossible to further talk about the rules because the traitor goes into a seperate room with his traitor tome while the others, the surivors, stay behind and discuss strategy with their survival tome. Each book has special rules and exceptions unique to the haunt you're playing. It's important that you don't read any of these two rulebooks beforehand at home (apart from the flavour text at the beginning and end of each scenario, that's alright) or you will be spoiled when you actually go out and play this game with friends. 
There are 50 different haunts with various scenarios ranging from demonic possession to vampires, werewolves, killer plants, aliens, Cthulhu and RATS! So the replayability of this game is enormous! Sometimes you're even dealing with an unknown traitor or a traitor who can turn other players (by making them werewolves for example).
It's important to note that there are some things the traitor knows that the survivors don't and vice versa. That's why each gets a different book or 'tome'. Often both parties only have a very basic understanding of what the others are trying to do to twart them. So once the traitor rejoins it doesn't just become exciting on the game board, it's important to look at the players as well, what they're doing and to not let slip any important secrets or strategies. I'll give you a little example. One time my sister unleashed a dragon and decided to barbecue us. (At our house we call this 'Wednesday') One of the team found a gun and we decided it was a very good idea to shoot the beast with modern weaponry! Go technology! Turns out my friend got eaten because the dragon's hide was immune to bullets ... something the traitor knew, but we didn't.
MY THOUGHTS ON THE GAME AND POSSIBLE ISSUES
If at this point you're giddy with excitement, I can't blame you. Playing out fantasy horror settings in this game is pretty amazing. The fact that you get something different every time you play is a great incentive to start another playthrough because you want to know what other horrifying haunts there are. Even if you happen to encounter a scenario you've already played the house will still be different, it might be more or less explored, your items will be more useful or not and the traitor could be different.
There are some issues with this game you do need to be aware of though. Even though there is a massive amount of replayability there aren't enough event cards for the amount that this game can be re-played. There are quite many, but if you play this game 5 times you've only scratched 1/10th of the available haunts. However you've pretty much encountered all the events in the event deck.
Games also don't have a set time. Due to the randomness of haunt rolling and sheer number of random things that could happen a game can last 30 minutes or 2 hours! So make sure to set aside plenty of time.
You might get a little overwhelmed by the amount of tokens. Rest assured that they're there to help and you only use a few every game. I advise sorting them well or simply leave them in the cardboard they came in. The only really bad addition to the game is a heap of black clips used to indicate various attributes on the character board. They're absolute rubbish and I've had to replace them with paperclips.
The biggest hurdle though are the traitor/survival rules and the language barrier. The basic game rules as they appear in phase one are pretty simple to understand and starting this game will be easy. However each scenario has special rules and often an enormous amount of text to go through. They fixed a lot of this in the 2nd reprint and a lot of rules are much less convoluted and better explained but it can still be tough to figure out the exact workings of any given haunt. Furthermore you need more than a basic understanding of English to succesfully play this game and this counts double if you're the traitor. If you're a survivor someone else can help you, but as a traitor you're on your own.
I was really worried when I got this game that some of my friends would panic just from the huge amount of text they'd need to read and would bail out (e.g. my sister hates reading and would probably never even read these reviews so I can tell you anything I like about her, hah!). Some of them wanted to be the traitor, but just couldn't understand how to do it while others would cringe every time the game selected them and sometimes the game does ask for a very specific person. I had a good long think about this and I came up with a special variant to fix all these issues.
EXTRA CONTENT: PLAYING THE GAME WITH A GAME MASTER
The idea came from Dungeons and Dragons. I would stay out of the game and let the others play clarifying the rules as they went. In order to have something to do I would draw the house tiles and place them and read aloud the event cards. This made the events much spookier as players couldn't immediately read what would happen to them or how much they needed to roll to pass a test. After a while I would even take a card and invent variations of it, weaving my own story but still keeping any dice rolls they had to do intact. For example if a card said they'd be assaulted by poisonous fog I could perhaps say that they were in fact the congealed souls of the dead ... this made events as various as my imagination could make them.
Most importantly I would go over the survivor tome with the survivors and afterwards confer with the traitor. Since I am the only one to know the 'full picture' it is much easier for me to guide them and help clear up some things that aren't obvious. Without revealing secret information of course!
Playing with a good GM can make this game accessible to any and all players be they casuals or hard core veterans. I even thaught some bikers who at first weren't interested (at all) and they had a blast playing this.
You may be worried that such a custom gamemode is boring, but I find it is actually quite fun to see the drama unfold on the table. Especially because you know all the angles. People rely on you a great deal and knowing that you're directly responsible for helping them get a better experience is very rewarding. After a while, when people are more familiar and comfortable with playing Betrayal, it's very possible that the GM isn't really required anymore (although my friends still sometimes ask me to do it again because I tell good stories).
CONCLUSION
So to tie this all up in a neat little bow: Betrayal at House on the Hill is one of the most thematic, story-rich and replayable games you'll find. It is incredibly fun but it suffers from some pretty intense text reading and the mechanics change and become more difficult as the game progresses, which can be problematic for casual players. A solution to this is assigning a good GM which can make it accessible to just about anyone.
This review was sponsored by the Outpost Vampire Blood-donation program. We cater all bloodtypes including a special on AB+ this week. Come donate your blood now at your friendly neighbourhood gamecenter! Think of the Vampires! Why do you think we open so late?
