We played another round of the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill last night. I’ve grown to really like this game over time — its basic mechanics are simple and straightforward, yet the heavy degree of randomisation with every game means that the experience is subtly different each and every time you play.
I won’t give specific details as unlike many board games, it is absolutely possible to “spoil” Betrayal at House on the Hill. For the unfamiliar, the basic flow of gameplay is split into two distinct sections: a cooperative initial section where everyone explores the creepy old house independently, generating its layout as they explore, followed by the “Haunt”, at which point one or more players are revealed to be a traitor (or not revealed, in some cases!) and given their own objectives to complete that are kept secret from the remaining “good” players. Which of the Haunts you take on in a session is determined by the combination of the room you were in when the Haunt was triggered, and the item you picked up that triggered the Haunt. The combination of these factors is sufficiently random that across several games, I’m yet to play the same scenario twice.
And those scenarios are enjoyably different from one another. In some cases, the traitorous player remains as a figure on the board, moving around and able to use the abilities and items they accumulated during the initial exploration phase. In others, the traitor’s character is removed from the board for one reason or another — perhaps they were killed, perhaps they became an evil spirit, perhaps they were never really there in the first place — and the traitor player instead takes on the role of an “overseer”, controlling all the monsters in the house and making use of special abilities to thwart the attempts of the players to fulfil their objective. Said objective usually involves getting the fuck out of the house that is suddenly trying to kill them, but there are often other things that they need to do first.
The mechanic I particularly like is the use of RPG-style “ability checks” to complete various actions. The way these work is simple: you look at your character’s current value for the stat in question, then roll that number of dice. The dice in Betrayal at House on the Hill are special six-sided ones that only have faces with one or two spots on, as well as a few with nothing at all on. To succeed in your task, you have to roll equal to or over a given number. For example, for a Knowledge 6+ check, you roll the number of dice for your character’s Knowledge stat, and must score 6 or more to successfully complete the task. In some cases — usually items or events — there are variable results according to the score you achieve, with zero normally meaning something horrendous happens. A critical failure, if you will.
The game is strongly thematic, but not at the expense of mechanical elegance. The exploration mechanic works well and produces interesting randomised board layouts each and every time you play, and the various items, events and traps you stumble across in the process make things interesting by perhaps adding shortcuts or hazards to contend with as you explore or run away screaming from a murderous evil thing.
Best of all, it plays pretty quickly — a game takes about an hour or so, meaning our gaming group can absolutely fit a game of it in on a weeknight before people start flagging (or, more frequently, need to get to bed before going to work the following day). I’m hoping it hits the table a bit more often from now on.