Betrayal at House on the Hill

Betrayal at House on the Hill
File:Betrayalbox200.jpg
Board Game published by Avalon Hill (Hasbro)
No. of Players	3 - 6
Session Time	~1 hour
First Publication	2004
Essential Books	Secrets of Survival, Traitor's Tome, Rule Book

Betrayal at House on the Hill quickly builds suspense and excitement as players explore a haunted mansion of their own design, encountering spirits and frightening omens that foretell their fate. With an estimated one hour playing time, Betrayal at House on the Hill is ideal for parties, family gatherings, or casual fun with friends.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a tile game that allows players to build their own haunted house room by room, tile by tile, creating a new thrilling game board every time. The game is designed for three to six people, each of whom plays one of six possible characters.

Creating the Mansion

Betrayal is a game where you wander around exploring a horror house, room by room. Basically, each character can move a number of rooms based on their speed trait value and if they wander into an unexplored space they draw a room tile and place it there. They then draw a card as stated by the room, which is either an event card (most common), an omen, or maybe even an item card. Then it's the next player's turn.

The events that can happen are usually something bad, such as you hear a scream, or horrifying ghosts appear before you, or something similar and you have to make some sort of trait roll to see if you endure (and improve your character by moving one stat up) or not (usually some sort of penalty to a stat).

Trait Rolls

For the trait rolls, the game is equipped with funny dice - strictly speaking, they're d3s minus 1, meaning they can show 0, 1, or 2 on any given roll. Each character has a number in each of the four traits - speed, strength, sanity and intellect. On a trait roll you roll as many dice as your trait value and see if you reach the target number for that particular roll.

So the players walk around in the house with hideous stuff happening to each and everyone as they stumble upon more stuff. If they're lucky, their trait values go up, and if they're unlucky, they go down. The characters have all different "configurations" for the traits shown on their character boards. The card message "Gain 1 sanity" means "move the sanity marker on your board up one step" which doesn't necessarily mean that the sanity value goes up. For instance, the configuration might be 1-2-3-3-4-4-5 or something similar.

If any trait goes down below the lowest value, the character dies. Although, they can't die before the Haunt starts, which means, before one of the players has turned into the traitor. And it's these Haunts that make the game worthwhile.

Omens and the Haunt

Each time a so called "Omen" card is drawn, the player who drew it must roll six dice to see if the Haunt starts. If they roll equal to or less then the number of "Omen" cards in play, then it starts. If they don't then they keep bumbling around the house until it does, eventually, start. At this point, the game turns into an "all against one", where the traitor and the heroes have different goals to pursue and it's a battle for victory.

Exactly what the Haunt is, and who is the traitor, depends on what Omen triggered the Haunt and in what room it was found. The players refer to the scenario book to see what Haunt they'll be playing and who is the traitorous fiend.

The player who is the traitor takes the Traitor's Tome (the traitor's version of the scenario book) and, preferably, leaves the room to read his version of the scenario and to plot his fellow player's demise. The remaining players pick up the Survivor's Manual (the hero version of the scenario book), read up on the current Haunt, and start to plan on how to survive.

The Haunt can be anything from the Traitor actually being a vampire lord trying to ensnare the other players to that the house in question is a living organism trying to eat them or even that the house is sinking, trapping everyone inside of it. After the Haunt has started, the heroes are now mortal and can be killed. The conditions for victory are specified in the respective scenario books, but naturally one team doesn't know exactly what it is the other team (?) is trying to achieve, although they can have some sort of clue. Usually the traitor's goal is to kill off the heroes, but the means by which he does this varies quite a bit. The heroes typically have to perform some trait rolls in some specified rooms in order to achieve something, such as escape on a toy airplane after being shrunk, or they have to find a specific object and use in a special way. There are 50 Haunts in the game and you can find more online, so it lasts quite awhile. My particular group of friends has played fifteen games and only replayed one Haunt.

And so the game goes on, with the heroes against the traitor, until either team can declare themselves the victor at which time a new game usually starts.

Issues

The only real problem with the game is that the very nature of its randomness makes some Haunts completely unfair for one team some games and the exact opposite the next time you play it. So in one Haunt the traitor could win on turn one and then everyone feels let down. This usually results in a new game being started, which ends up being far more entertaining. The errata helps to fix this issue a bit as well as clarify some typos in the tomes.

Also, there are too many damn tokens. It's easy to lose them and hard to find the ones you want sometimes.

Also, also, the game is out of print. Due to this factor, this $40 game has skyrocketed up to an $80-$100 game.

Errata

Secrets of Survival Errata

Traitors Tome Errata

Links

Custom Haunts (Survivor's Tome)

Custom Haunts (Traitor's Tome)

Wizards Website

Gallery

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