SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

BOARDGAMES: Betrayal in the House on the Hill
 

Since there's a major tournament coming up this weekend my sleep gets completely ruined so I can't ******* sleep atm. Instead I felt like writing up a boardgame recommendation for people who like Boardgames. I've also been watching far too much Shut up and Sit Down recently and goddammit that pair knows how to make boardgames seem like the funnest bestest thing ever.

So on thursday this week I went to a place with my brother Joshua to get our cardboard duelling on and play us some boardgames with total strangers. First up we played Kingdom Builder (not my sort of thing, I find management games like that poorly paced and too single player for my liking so I get bored and play them badly), then Saboteurs (light and easy and a lot of fun, recommended for a laugh), then King of Tokyo (interesting) then finally Betrayal in the House on the hill. Here's what it looks like after about 30 minutes:



So betrayal is one of my favourite kinds of Boardgames, the 'cooperative' board game, where most of the people around the table have to work together to achieve a goal and there's a few of you who are utter bastards trying to ruin it for everyone else. Battlestar Galactica is one of my favourite boardgames and it implements this feature really well with players sitting around arguing over who is the Cylon for hours on end, and Shadows over Camelot I also admire even though it's formula has been built on a lot and it does pale a bit in comparison to the more polished examples of the genre.

What makes Betrayal interesting is that the traitor isn't decided at the start like usual. It comes as a surprise later on. Maybe I should start at the beginning.

Betrayal is an homage to every horror film, show, story and trope for the last thirty years. Each player selects a character all of whom have different stats and you start in the entrance hall of the eponymous house. At the start of the game characters explore through the house placing down a new room tile for each room you discover, so the house generates itself randomly as you play and is always different. Awesome. Every time you discover a new room you draw a card from one of three decks; an Item, which is usually good, an event, which is usually bad, and an Omen, which deserves it's own paragraph.

So there are 13 cards on the Omen deck and each one is generally extremely useful but every time you trigger an Omen you have to roll some dice. If you roll below the amount of revealed Omens then the Haunt begins, and that is when one player is randomly chosen to be the Traitor. First of all that's ******* genius design. But the real business is the traitor's scenario.

There are two books that come with betrayal and depending on what room and/or omen triggered both sides have to consult their own 'Tome of Secrets' to discover what happened. In our game, Josh was a traitor and he controlled both his character and a Poltergeist monster who could do all sorts of neat shit we had no idea how it worked at all. Josh did because his book told him. All we knew was we had to find some candles somewhere and perform some ritual and try really hard not to get killed by the bloody ghost before that happened.

When we played through this my mind kind of exploded because holy crap that's amazing. And there's so many different scenarios too! I've only seen that one of them and I avoided reading through the booklets in case of spoiling any other playthrough I might go through, but the idea of hiding so much information from both teams and the execution is incredibly brilliant. In our game I theorised that killing off the traitor character first would somehow weaken the poltergeist and that we should focus on that first. Turns out it didn't do that at all but I like how the game makes you think that could happen and try and intuit proper strategies.

From here the goodly team wins if they can defeat the haunt and the naughty player wins if they achieve their objective which in our case was kill all the goodies, which unfortunately Josh managed to do. It's worth pointing out that up to this point there's no actual objective given to the players other then just to keep exploring the house and try to trigger the event, hopefully building up a cache of items and stat boosts to make it easier for them.

Gameplay is also rather simple, though we did play with a few people who knew the rules rather well we never consulted the manual or got stuck on anything and each persons turn flowed rather quickly. Move here, put a house tile, flip a card and maybe roll some dice. Very quick and exciting, we all got into a good pace and avoided that awkward 10-20 minutes of boardgaming where you're trying to go through your first turn laboriously and understand every bit of rule so you can play the game properly.

The best aspect of Betrayal for me and Josh though was all the little stories and jokes that come with it. For example, when Joshes traitor character, an old man who couldn't fight very well but had excellent Mental stats, was fleeing a pursuer he decided to explore more the house and discovered a Graveyard where he was promptly killed by one of the players. When I'd uncovered a Spear item and a Holy Symbol item I joked that all I needed know was a Storm Bolter to properly become a 40k Grey Knight and immediately after I said that I flipped a Revolver item card (close enough!) and the game itself came down to just a couple of incredibly improbable dice rolls which I failed (my character was very good at finding candles and running around but incredibly useless at actually lighting the ******* things. Grumble. Josh did well to kill the smart members of the team off first).



If there's one thing I would criticise it's that after you die you can't impact the game anymore so if you're unlucky and get killed off quick by the traitor then prepare to be very bored. At least you can't be killed before the haunt begins but it's still kinda shitty. In Battlestar it's impossible for players to be killed completely which is nice, even if you're doing incredibly poorly and are probably going to lose at least you're still a part of the game.

I fully recommend Betrayal at the House on the Hill to anyone who likes to get their dice and cardboard on. It's extremely well paced, very easy to learn, you get to laugh and joke and swear with a bunch of mates, you spend a lot of time talking and planning out moves and most importantly it's an awful lot of fun. One of the best games I've played in a long time.