1821: Interlude at the House on the Hill

It’s late and I’m very, very tired so I will continue the creative writing tomorrow. Apologies to anyone following and absolutely desperate to know what happens next. (This also gives me a day to figure out what happens next, which is probably “cheating”, but whatever.)

Instead, I wanted to talk a little about a board game I got for Christmas and had the opportunity to try out for the first time this evening. It’s called Betrayal at House on the Hill, and it’s a game I’ve had my eye on for a while since seeing it on Wil Wheaton’s board gaming show Tabletop.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is an unusual and peculiar game in that it’s sort of two games in one. The first part is purely exploration and treasure hunting: you and up to five friends explore a creepy old randomly-generated house, collecting treasures and “omens” and having various events occurring — some good, some bad, some strange.

At a particular point, “the haunt” begins. The longer the initial phase goes on, the more likely the haunt becomes, since its likelihood of occurring is tied to the number of omen cards in play at any one time. (Omens, despite their, well, ominous name, often take the form of useful items, so it’s actually in your interest to collect them, even with the inherent risk they carry.)

When the haunt begins, several things happen. First of all, one of fifty different scenarios is chosen according to the omen drawn and the room it was discovered in. Next, at least one of the players becomes a traitor. In most scenarios, it’s known which player is the traitor, but there are a few examples of “hidden traitor” scenarios where one person is secretly working against the others.

At this point, the remaining players and the traitor are, as you might expect, in direct opposition to one another, but the interesting thing when compared to other, mechanically similar games such as Descent or other dungeon-crawlers with an “evil” player is that the two groups don’t have all the pertinent information about one another: each side has a book revealing only information relevant to their side, and the rest they must figure out themselves. This includes, in the heroes’ case, how strong, fast and intelligent the monsters they’re facing are, and even what the traitorous player’s end goal might be. Likewise, the traitor doesn’t necessarily know what the players are up to, though his material might give him a bit of a clue — and the players’ behaviour might give him even more of a clue.

As an example, the scenario we picked this evening saw one player come across a madman in the house’s basement, which triggered the haunt. Zombies rose from the dead, and the original player character was killed, leaving the traitorous player in control of the madman and the zombies. His objective was simply to kill all the other players — a task which he completed fairly effectively and efficiently. Our objective as the heroes, meanwhile, was to trap the zombies by luring them into rooms that had been important to them in life — we knew which rooms these were, but the traitor did not, and there were specific rules about how the zombies moved that allowed us to “pull” them in particular directions through careful, strategic movement.

Unfortunately, things did not go all that well. My character died almost immediately after the haunt began having been flung into the basement earlier, not being able to find the way back up the stairs, getting surrounded by zombies and finally, embarrassingly, succumbing to nothing more than the heat from a furnace beneath the mansion. The others, variously, were eaten by zombies and brutalised by the madman, leading the traitorous player to a convincing victory.

I enjoyed the game a lot. The rules are straightforward and quick, turns are snappy and the split-personality nature of the game makes it very interesting. The 50 different scenarios coupled with the randomly generated nature of the house means that there’s a whole lot of replay value, too, so I’m looking forward to giving it another go sometime soon.