Thoughts on… Betrayal at House on the Hill
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure for a big surprise… because deep inside those creepy woods, you and your friends will come across an old mansion, long ago abandoned… it seems. But it’s getting dark and a storm is approaching, so you decide it would be better to take cover than risk a night out in the forest. The strongest in your group forces open the door and you pile into the entrance hall as lightning flashes and the rain lashes down. Did the old door open with greater ease than you expected? That’s craftsmanship, I guess…
Time to explore the house. This is the first phase of the game, as you split up (always a good idea… right?) and find out the layout of the place. Each time you pass through a door you pick up a new tile from the stack and place it in front of your character. Perhaps you’ll find a storeroom, and discover a useful item. Or perhaps a creepy, or downright terrifying event will occur! Grabbed by something slimy in the kitchen, or buffeted by a howling gale in the conservatory… there is something not quite right about this place!
When you look at it as a strategy game, this exploration is really just a randomisation process. There’s no way of knowing what will happen, some players will have bad events, some players good, others will find useful weapons, some will be stuck exploring endless empty corridors. It’s terrible from the perspective of a strategy game. But here’s the key thing you need to remember about this game: it’s not about strategy, or winning or losing, it’s about the experience and the story. So when you would draw an event card, give it to another player to read in their spookiest B-Movie voice! You’ll probably be rolling dice, so this way you won’t know ahead of time what the results will be, adding tension. Meanwhile, have some Halloween music playing in the background, dim the lights, this is a horror film unfolding on your table top, and as you push deeper into the house, it’s going to get scarier…
… because I haven’t yet mentioned the Omen cards! These nefarious portents of doom can be found in the creepiest rooms in the house. A madman hiding in the Pentagram Chamber, the raven cawing from the balcony, the Spirit Board ducking copyright infringement in the Furnace Room. On their own they act similar to other items you could collect, and yet they are so much more! For when drawn you must take a handful of the game’s suspiciously pip-less dice and roll, hoping for a number higher than there have been omens thus far. For if you fail the rickety floors will shake and a great cry shall echo through the house: the haunt has begun!
The Haunt is the core of Betrayal at House on the Hill, and the element that will bring you back to play it again and again! The exploration of the house, the steady increase in tension as the Omen card rolls become harder and harder, it has all been building to this, the revelation that you didn’t come across this house by accident. No. One of your friends has lured you here to do unspeakable things! What things? Well, to find that out you must turn to the two books branded with the phrase “Do Not Read Before the Haunt Scenario Begins”, the Secrets of Survival and the Traitor’s Tome.
Within these brilliant books are 50, that’s right, 50 different scenarios for your group to discover, covering every silly horror B-movie scenario you can imagine. The exact omen card and location that triggered the draw determines both what scenario you’ll play (there’s a table in the first page of the Traitor’s Tome), as well as which of you is the traitor! From now on the game shifts into a one verses all scenario, but first the relevant scenario needs to be read and, if you are part of the survivor’s (although that is probably the wrong word for the non-traitors in my experience) group, discussed. The traitor will take the Traitor’s Tome and literally leave the room.
The scenario pages are different between the two books. The traitor will typically know much more than the survivors, but neither side will know how the other wins. And there are always a slew of special rules and traps that come into play, typically unbeknown to the survivors. The players are plunged into a game of hidden information with their very lives on the line, for where combat was previously banned, it now bubbles angrily to the surface.
The survivors will discuss their scenario and make plans initially, only for those to be sent hurtling out the window the moment the traitor reveals a new element of gameplay. You must all then come up with a new plan while the traitor is sat in front of you listening, typically with an evil grin on their face! Every step becomes fraught with tension, you never quite knowing when another trap is going to strike.
Its not entirely one sided though. The traitor will have no idea what you need to do to win, and will be responding to your actions. Sure, it’s probably in their best interests to run around the house with an axe butchering you one at a time, but that’s not always going to be enough. Plus there is excellent scope for bluffing, as we discovered in our latest game. Needing to lure the traitor’s character to a specific room, we had gathered there, but naturally the traitor sensed a trap. So we started performing Sanity tests, a dice roll based on our sanity stat, and accruing markers in that room. They didn’t do anything in game terms, but the traitor didn’t know that!
Much like a real horror story, it’s better to not assume the situation is balanced. The traitor has lured you to this house to do unspeakable things to you after all! Quite often the survivors might benefit from a specific item or location, but if they aren’t on the board, then you’ll have to find it. If during the initial exploration you discovered the coal chute and slipped into the basement, you could be trapped there until you find the stairs out: not a good place to be if you need to escape the house! And then the scenarios themselves are always geared towards the traitor (in our experience at least). Put it this way, I’ve yet to see the survivors…er… survive the game!
But that doesn’t matter! Don’t play this game to win. Play this game for the experience! For the stories it generates! In our group, Chris always seems to be the traitor, with a ludicrously over-powered character that seemed tailor made to that scenario. Such a thing might frustrate you. For us, it’s just funny! Painful at the time sure, but hilarious. These stories get brought back every time the game is mentioned. That is something you can’t say for many pure strategy games.
Before I conclude, I wanted to mention the components. The room tiles are all nicely illustrated with the clutter and detritus of an old and long abandoned house. Well except for the squatters and used needles and the like, but I think that is probably for the best. The unnaturally long cards and pentagonal player boards, so similar to what you expect and yet obviously unusual, are a very clever way of putting players slightly on edge, which I love! The dice, with their blank sides, don’t work the way you expect a dice should work. The box is full of hundreds of tokens for monsters and items and things that might only occur once in the game’s 50 scenarios. It is ridiculous, but also wonderful at the same time. The only failures on the component side are the sliding plastic markers that are used to track your characters stats, which slide far too freely, and the pretty awful character miniatures. Madame Zostra has been halfway through a limbo performance since I’ve owned the set! But these are minor quibbles.
Betrayal at House on the Hill is a masterpiece. If you are a win at all costs, strategy game fanatic, if you play games for their elegant mechanisms, you’ll probably hate this game. But then, I’m sorry to say, you’re playing it wrong! No, it’s not balanced, yes, it’s ludicrously random, but as an experience, as a story-generating machine, it fulfils its job magnificently! No other game captures the silliness and fun of a B-Movie horror film, every time you play. This is my favourite Halloween game!
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