Halloween Countdown Day 50 - Betrayal at House on the Hill

 

Build a House of Terror. Tile by Tile.

Hello boils and ghouls, your Eerie host has yet another Halloween offering for you. A little autumnal offering by a board game company called Avalon Hill.
Now, while Avalon Hill may be most well known for their extremely complicated WWII board games (some games boasted over 200 pages of rules alone, making their size akin to a phone book.) eventually they decided that perhaps most people don’t get their kicks reading massive manuals and they branched out into simpler, easier to pick up games. This is the tradition that Betrayal at House on the Hill is born out of.
 If you are not sure if board games aren’t quiet your thing, Betrayal at House on the Hill is the perfect test case. Betrayal at House on the Hill is quick to set up, easy to play, and has excellent value for the dead presidents that you’ll shell out for it should you decide to get it.

                                          

The game-play is rather simple, you and your unfortunate friends explore a haunted house, laying out the house at random as you explore it by using adjacent tiles, doing your best to buff your stats before the Haunting begins. In the second phase of play, when the Big Bad is revealed, it becomes the Big Bad (who is occasionally a player, and sometimes isn’t) vs. his former friends/the rest of the group. As far as I know, there isn’t quite any game like this. There are 50 Hauntings in the game, coupled with the way that the gameboard is laid out, gives you plenty of replay value.

                                                                       

While this game does get some flak for the random-quality it has and a lack of strategic depth, it’s still incredibly fun to play. I remember quite fondly the first time I played Betrayal at House on the Hill. It was over at a former DM’s house where we’d just finished a session of Pathfinder. We weren’t quite ready to go home yet, and he asked if we’d be interested in playing Betrayal at House on the Hill. I’m glad he did.

I ended up playing Flash, the fastest guy. The Cannibal Cultists wanted to eat us and we had some players trapped upstairs. Since the house was small the people were placed in a room adjacent to the stairs. My fellow explorer was the mad scientist who had mad knowledge whose name escapes me, but it probably implies that he was mad.
                                                                           

Mad Scientist went to make what should have been a simple roll (If you’ve ever played any sort of roleplaying or board game, you know that this is where it all falls apart). I brought the first captive to the door, but the Scientist failed his roll. I sped back upstairs, getting the other captive. The door was still shut. Mad Scientist had failed the roll for a third time with something like a 66% chance of success. The cannibals were getting closer. Finally, I tried a strength roll to open the door, which I ended up passing. Even though the action only played out in our imagination, it was like watching a horror movie. We were trapped, fumbling with a door that shouldn't have been that hard to open.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a great example of a game that even people that don’t particularly enjoy playing games can enjoy and get into fast. The Haunts are fun, and if your players want something with a little more depth and longer play time to it, you might want to check out Arkham Horror. If it sounds like Betrayal at House on the Hill is something you'd enjoy, perhaps you'd like to check out the demo, here!