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[eHalcyon]

So today I got to go to a recently opened board game cafe with some friends.  For those not familiar with it, the basic premise is that the players are exploring a haunted house.  As you come upon new rooms, they will happen upon events, items and omens.  Events are mostly bad things.  Items are self-explanatory.  Omens are also bad things, except the notch up a counter.  After each omen is drawn, the player must roll a bunch of dice (which only number 0-3).  If they roll lower than the number of omens uncovered so far, the Haunt begins.

This is the real fun of the game.  There are 50 Haunt scenarios in the game and they depend on the omen that triggered the haunt an the specific room where it happened.  Depending on the scenario, one of the players becomes a traitor.  At this point, the traitor and all the rest will get a special scenario book which tells them their win condition and various special powers/minions.  Many of these details are secret.

One of the games we ended up trying was Betrayal at House on the Hill.  We played two games and I ended up the traitor both times.  The first game, the other FIVE players ended up very close to exactly where they needed to be and there was pretty much nothing I could do to stop them (had I even known how to stop them).  The second game was much closer, though the heroes weren't aware at the time.  If I had only rolled a 4 on my last turn, I would have succeeded...

Anyway, it was a blast.  Very fun game, not too long especially given that we were playing with 6 people.  I'm very interested in purchasing it.  I was wondering if any others have experience with the game and if they any thoughts to offer on it.  Are there any other games that offer a similar, but better experience?  If you haven't heard of it before, I highly recommend checking it out.  There really isn't much strategy to it, but it's quite the experience.

[Titandrake]

I've played it twice. Once we had to stop midway through for time constraints, the second time I was the traitor but had no way to win and lost very quickly.

From what I remember, there's an annoying amount of errata in it, and there's an issue where everyone should know the rules before the Haunt starts, because once combat gets involved it's hard to ask rules questions as the traitor without giving up information. From what I've heard from other people, it's fun until you run through a couple scenarios, and then it gets boring. It's not a game you win, it's a game you experience, and your mileage will depend on how interesting you think the scenarios are. If your strongest combat person becomes the traitor, you're pretty screwed.

I've played one other game similar to it called Space Alert. The premise is that you're a crew on a ship and aliens are attacking, and to win you need to fend them off. What makes it fun is that it plays in real time. There's an included MP3 that shouts out what's happening in 10 minutes of real time. In those minutes, everyone places commands to execute every time step, and the commands must stay face down. Once the 10 minutes are up, everyone reveals their commands, and you play out what happens. The design of the game is that different people need to coordinate because no one person has the time to do everything, but you have limited time to communicate and if any one person makes the wrong action, it can ruin the entire chain of events. Things like, you try to fire a gun but someone didn't charge it when you thought they would, so you don't damage that enemy and they got an attack you weren't expecting so your repair wasn't as effective as you hoped and that means this other gun is now offline and... (I don't actually know if that's something doable in the game, just making something up here that approximates how it feels.)

[Tables]

I play it a lot, pretty much it's an intro filler game for my group.

It's terribly imbalanced. A decent amount of the time, one group (heroes or traitor(s)) will almost certainly win just by virtue of what the haunt is. Recently I played a haunt where me and the other heroes managed to kill the traitor and kill all the monsters, without too much trouble, but since we hadn't met our win condition, we needed to explore the house indefinitely, with me having used the crystal ball repeatedly to make sure nothing could hurt me as I explored. Other times I've seen the traitors win in one or two turns.

But it's a really fun game, just because of it's variability and ease in teaching.

I don't think it's anything like Space Alert. They seem like completely different genres and styles to me.

[Titandrake]

I said Space Alert was similar because most of the fun is in seeing what happens, not in actually winning. Of course, you try to beat the scenario, but if you get a giant mess instead then that's fine too.

[Watno]

I played this years ago and have no real memory of how I liked it. I'm pretty sure it didn't feel similar to Space Alert at all though.

[A Drowned Kernel]

A very popular game with my friends, though it is very luck based and unbalanced. It's good for casual gamers/casual game nights. The new edition fixes all the old errors and clears up the rule ambiguities, but the two sets I've played with both had a problem where the sliders you use to keep track of stats don't fit properly on the character, uh, pentagon-things. One of my friends has taken to using pen and paper to keep track of her stats.

[Tables]

A very popular game with my friends, though it is very luck based and unbalanced. It's good for casual gamers/casual game nights. The new edition fixes all the old errors and clears up the rule ambiguities, but the two sets I've played with both had a problem where the sliders you use to keep track of stats don't fit properly on the character, uh, pentagon-things. One of my friends has taken to using pen and paper to keep track of her stats.

We put some thick tape (possibly something like electrical tape?) around the edges of the characters and the bottom of the turn track marker. It seemed to work extremely well, the characters are still largely undamaged despite repeated use and the sliders stay on but can be slid up and down easily.

I said Space Alert was similar because most of the fun is in seeing what happens, not in actually winning. Of course, you try to beat the scenario, but if you get a giant mess instead then that's fine too.

Oh, yeah I see what you're saying. I still don't personally think they feel very similar but I can see why you do.

Finally I leave everyone with the best thing from Betrayal:

[eHalcyon]

From what I remember, there's an annoying amount of errata in it, and there's an issue where everyone should know the rules before the Haunt starts, because once combat gets involved it's hard to ask rules questions as the traitor without giving up information. From what I've heard from other people, it's fun until you run through a couple scenarios, and then it gets boring. It's not a game you win, it's a game you experience, and your mileage will depend on how interesting you think the scenarios are. If your strongest combat person becomes the traitor, you're pretty screwed.

The first edition has a lot of errata, but my understanding is that the second edition is mostly patched up.

In the second game we played, I became the traitor because I had the most might, and that particular scenario made me even more powerful.  The heroes still won, though it came right down to the wire (a single dice roll from me, actually).  I realize that there is a lot of randomness though, and that the game is more about the experience rather than any particular skill or strategy.





In the two games I played, I drew Jonah's Turn both times.  Puzzle Box wasn't up either time though.

[A Drowned Kernel]

There's an errata from the first edition that I kind of wish they had kept in as a joke because it didn't really affect the rules, and that's the fact that the underground lake was a second-floor only room.

[AJD]

There's an errata from the first edition that I kind of wish they had kept in as a joke because it didn't really affect the rules, and that's the fact that the underground lake was a second-floor only room.

Man, the first time I played this game, we got the Tentacle Monster scenario, and to kill the monster we needed to stab it in the brain, and its brain was located in the Underground Lake, and we explored every basement room and every first-floor room before finally hiking upstairs to look for it there. Because of that and other errata, that game didn't end till 6am.

[eHalcyon]

There's an errata from the first edition that I kind of wish they had kept in as a joke because it didn't really affect the rules, and that's the fact that the underground lake was a second-floor only room.

In our very first game, the room below the collapsed room (on the ground floor) was the mystic elevator.  My friend said it was some real antichamber stuff going down.  I said we must have been in Hogwarts.  I think there was at least one time when someone "fell" up into the elevator.

This quirk was partially to blame for my loss as a traitor in that game.  Two heroes were in a mostly unexplored basement where the only way down at that point was through the coal shoot or the elevator.  IIRC, I dropped through the collapsed room into the elevator and then immediately transported it away, trapping those two players.  I thought I was perfectly safe at that point.  It was on the very next player's turn that the strongest hero also dropped down the collapsed room to chase after me and punch me in the face.  It was 6 dice to 3 so... yeah.  That was painful.  But also hilarious.

Question about the collapsed room though -- in our plays, the friend hanging onto the rulebook said that you only fell through the collapsed room when it was revealed.  After that, you could pass safely through or choose to fall through it.  But reviews on BGG make it sound like you should still be doing a speed roll or something to see if you can pass through it safely.

[noobify]

Question about the collapsed room though -- in our plays, the friend hanging onto the rulebook said that you only fell through the collapsed room when it was revealed.  After that, you could pass safely through or choose to fall through it.  But reviews on BGG make it sound like you should still be doing a speed roll or something to see if you can pass through it safely.

I think your friend is right. I've been playing with this rule. Choosing to fall through it still causes you to take damage though, unless you're the traitor.

Betrayal is a great game, but gets stale after you play most of the haunts. Someone created and shared an extra 20 custom haunts, but i forgot where they are. I think it's not too hard to find them though.

[eHalcyon]

Question about the collapsed room though -- in our plays, the friend hanging onto the rulebook said that you only fell through the collapsed room when it was revealed.  After that, you could pass safely through or choose to fall through it.  But reviews on BGG make it sound like you should still be doing a speed roll or something to see if you can pass through it safely.

I think your friend is right. I've been playing with this rule. Choosing to fall through it still causes you to take damage though, unless you're the traitor.

Betrayal is a great game, but gets stale after you play most of the haunts. Someone created and shared an extra 20 custom haunts, but i forgot where they are. I think it's not too hard to find them though.

There are some on BGG.  I will investigate if we ever get to that point, but we are a long ways away.

I finally have a copy of my own.  I noticed that the box has a lot of clearance at the top, which means that things don't stay in their compartments if the box gets inverted or even if it is stood on its side as sometimes when in transit.  I've gotten together some containers to hold all the tokens, dice and miniatures, and I made a tuckbox for the cards.  Not sure if I should bother to do anything with the pentagonal character cards.

Anybody interested in a very simple tuckbox for unsleeved cards?  I could post it.

Oh, I finally got to win as traitor.

[eHalcyon]

Wanted to share my storage solution.  I had two goals:

- Components don't get jumbled around during transit, even if the box gets jostled or inverted.
- Can store in the original box with insert or removed and stored in something less bulky.

So everything has a box now! 

The character cards have a pentagonal tuckbox, the reverse of which is shown in the top right image.  The bottom 3 flaps are sealed while the top 2 flaps can open.  I made the box taller than necessary so that it doesn't fall out of the pentagon space in the insert.  With a thinner box, it could get free and slide around because there is so much clearance.  To use up the extra space inside the pentagon tuckbox, I have another small box inside that holds all the sliders.

The tokens are stored in a 2-layer box.  The bottom left shows the box with the lid removed.  Both layers can be removed, though I don't think it will ever be necessary to remove the bottom layer.  The top layer contains common tokens (event/room, item and roll tokens) as well as the boss monsters.  The bottom layer has all the small monster tokens.  The walls are high enough that the small monster tokens always stay in their compartments when packed away.  Unfortunately, the lid is just a bit too loose so that one or two of the tokens in the top layer will sometimes escape their spot, but only if the box is treated roughly.

It's hard to tell, but the compartments in the bottom layer are colour-coded.  I couldn't think of good designs for the top-layer so I just made the separate compartments form the omen icon again.

The other boxes may not be necessary, especially the one for the room tiles.  However, they are useful for transporting the components without the insert.

[GendoIkari]

I've played many times. I have the original edition; I haven't played the remake. Even after all my plays though, I still have several scenarios I've never seen.

[gkrieg13]

My wife and I just got this game to play at game night and were surprised that it actually plays pretty well as a two person game!

What we do is just each play two players until the haunt happens, then it is the player who controlled the traitor against the other player controlling the three heroes.  The game is definitely very unbalanced, but it is very fun.

[Awaclus]

I've played it a couple of times and it's a pretty good game. I just wonder about the replayability given how important the surprise factor is.

[eHalcyon]

I've played it a couple of times and it's a pretty good game. I just wonder about the replayability given how important the surprise factor is.

Well, there are 50 haunts and now an expansion with more. I guess you could get tired of the event cards though.