Opportunity Actions: Game Night Blog Carnival – Betrayal at the House on the Hill

Welcome to the new Game Night Blog Carnival!  This is a new feature we’re doing once a month with a few other RPG blogs.  If you have an RPG blog, and would like to participate, check out the FAQ at the main Game Night page.

I’ll start by saying that I know, this is supposed to be about non-RPG board games, but I couldn’t resist with this one being such a personal favorite. So, turn down the lights, and prepare to be met by horrors that will have you begging for sunrise. …Or something.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a cooperative board game that was produced by the Avalon Hill division of Wizards of the Coast. It creates a horror story in the classic vein of haunted house styled movies that have been made, remade, reimagined, and whatever other things that could possibly happen to a film concept. You and your cohorts play investigators of an old mansion that has been left abandoned. At a randomly determined point, the investigation goes sour, and supernatural forces inflict themselves upon the poor saps that wandered in.

This is handled in a very similar way to Castle Ravenloft (if you’re unfamiliar with that game, read our review here).  Room tiles are taken from a deck of tiles, laying out the sprawling mansion as the game goes along. There aren’t too many rules for how this happens, just that the door from the previous room must connect to a door in the new room. Along the way, items are found, mysterious things happen, and omens are uncovered. As more and more omens are revealed, the chance of things taking a dark turn increases until the threshold is breached, an betrayal occurs.

That’s when things really get interesting. One player is chosen to be the traitor by the scenario that is selected. That player has his or her own agenda, while the other players have the opposite agenda. Supernatural hijinks ensue, and the end result is a spook-filled romp.

What I Like

• I enjoy the presentation. I have a soft spot for supernatural horror stories, and this game provides all the mystery and eldritchery that is signature to the haunted house subgenre.
• The game bits are also a great asset. The figures represent the characters well, the cards help tell the story, and the overall look of the game tiles is fun.
• Any cooperative game is already scoring points in my book, not because I dislike competition, but because I like teamwork more. A traitor mechanic is also a plus.

Things That Aren’t So Great

• Some of the rules are unclear at times. There have been occasions in games where things didn’t work out right because certain rules were interpreted the wrong way.
• Laying the tiles, while fun, can be logically obtuse. I understand the notion that the layout should represent the sort of weird mansion built by old time idle rich eccentrics, but certain arrangements have made me scratch my head.
  • Often, the upper floor will extend in strange ways that leaves it unsupported by anything below. This could be easy to explain away by saying it was built into a slope, but this is the house on the hill, not the house in the hill.
  • There has been at least one game, in my experience, where the arrangement of rooms actually wrapped around the front of the mansion, and blocked the front door. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing (one can imagine some sort of footbridge that goes over the interfering rooms), but in the game where this happened, the upper floor also hung over the front door of the house, meaning it was blocked on all sides, with no means of entry. Granted, we set out to do this from the start, but it does sort of wreck the atmosphere.
• The Underground Lake Tile. If you’re at all familiar with the game, then you know about this. There’s a tile called the Underground Lake. If you read the back of it, the Underground Lake is meant to appear on the upper floor. Underground. Upper floor. A lake. Yeah. So, there’s errata for that, but even that seems like a strange sort of band-aid approach to a weird misprint.

Summary

I should probably mention that I own the first edition of this game. I don’t know of many major changes between editions. I can only speculate that the rules were cleaned up a bit, and the Underground Lake was put in the basement where it belongs.

I love this game, especially on nights when circumstances prevent an RPG session from happening according to plan. It has story elements, has intuitive design features, and is generally a lot of fun to just crack open and play. If you find yourself with a canceled game session, I can’t think of a better recommendation than this to keep that need working. In this house, consider all your squares threatened.

Oh, and be sure to check out the Home of Kindros. That’s the next blog in the here carnival, where they discuss the Resident Evil deckbuilding game. Enjoy!

IMAGE NOTES: The cover image is the property of Wizards of the Coast.