#oneaday Day 369: Whoosh

I had barely a free moment to write last night, so apologies for the lateness! My parents stopped by for a flying visit after work, then immediately after that I was off to see some friends and play some board games. (They all got to drink mulled wine and eat mince pies, but I did not partake due to the whole keto thing. Also I don't really like mulled wine and mince pies, so I didn't mind too much.)

We played a game of Betrayal at House on the Hill, a game I like very much indeed. It's a game that begins as a cooperative exploratory game where you gradually reveal a randomly generated map of a spooky old house, but at some point in this initial phase a "haunt" will begin, at which point all of your characters become possessed and play out a scene from the mansion's past — usually with fatal consequences.

This latter part of the game is interesting because it's asymmetrical. There's always at least one "traitor" who has distinct objectives to the rest of the players, and at this point the game becomes a competitive affair, one team against another.

There are a lot of haunts in the base game, with even more added in the Widow's Walk expansion. All play very differently from one another; the one we played last night was a riff on Cluedo, where we had to retrieve items and establish alibis in various rooms around the house before 1) the police arrived or 2) the actual murderer got us. We failed, primarily due to problem number 2. The murderer had a chainsaw, could not be killed and, upon his first encounter with me, wrenched my "blood dagger" out of my arm, leaving me in excruciating pain and extremely vulnerable to being eviscerated.

The mechanics of the game are simple and straightforward; the beauty of the game is that they're incredibly flexible. In some respects they're similar to the mechanics of a tabletop roleplaying game, in that a lot of things are resolved by "success rolls" based on your stats, and unique mechanics crop up only as and when they are needed.

I'm a big fan of the game. The only unfortunate thing about it is that if a player is killed early (as one of our number was) they, in most cases, have literally nothing to do for the rest of the game, which is always a shame. Still, it's kind of unavoidable in a game where there is genuine peril for the participant characters, I guess!