#bahoth

I spent New Year’s Eve trying out some new (to me at least) board games with friends over drinks in what was a great evening. We played two games: Betrayal at House on the Hill, and another game called ‘Boss Monsters’

Boss Monsters didn’t impress me all that much. The game lacked interaction between players and I felt like there was too much information to track in order to maximize your resources. It always sucks in games to find out a choice you made was incorrect just because you didn’t notice something across the table.

However, the other board game I played that night left me very impressed.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game for 3-6 players, which I played in a group of 5. You each play as a character tasked with exploring a haunted house that is randomly assembled by using tiles to represent each room you enter.

As you play, the house gets slowly bigger as you uncover items, stat changing effects (both positive and negative) and more rooms. While this is happening, you creep ever so closer to the end-game... the haunting itself. Most of this review is going to be discussing this haunting mechanic, as it’s this feature that lead to me being as impressed as I was with Betrayal.

You begin each game working together until a ‘traitor’ is revealed when the haunt begins. When this happens, all the players are given a condition they must meet in order to win, and the traitor is given their own win condition, which often goes directly against the win condition of the rest of the players. These win conditons vary depending on the haunt, and there are over 50 different kinds of hauntings to play through, most of which drastically change the game rules.

Often, games with as many random elements as Betrayal fall foul of leaving players feeling as though they are having no impact on what happens in the game. Betrayal gets around this by making the ‘Haunt’ where the primary decision making takes place. As these later decisions are heavily impacted by the random elements of the early game, it makes these early elements feel more exciting. When you find a powerful item, you’re not excited about what it means right now, you’re excited about the implications this discovery will happen once the haunt begins.

The social element of the haunt is also something I’d praise. You go into each game knowing there will be a traitor in your midst, and the anticipation for the reveal adds to the fun. Turning against your former allies carries a sadistic form of pleasure that’s hard to deny.

I was impressed by how much the haunt was willing to change the core mechanics of the game too. Whole new gameplay mechanics can be introduced for the sake of a single haunt, adding to that ‘no two games play the same’ draw. This is a feature that heavily encourages repeat playthroughs, greatly increasing the value prospect of picking up a copy of this game.

While the haunts that we ended up playing didn’t seem like the best the game had to offer, the fact that the strength of the game shone through regardless is a testament to the quality of Betrayal.

As anyone who’s read one of my video game reviews will have picked up by now, I’m a huge fan of rogue-likes. Games with a strong core that encourage repeat playthroughs appeal to me immensely, and Betrayal takes that idea and perfectly transitions it to the medium of board games.