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McSweens's Betrayal at House on the Hill (Other)
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| [February 10, 2015 11:14:11 PM]
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Betrayal at House on the Hill lies somewhere comfortably between board game and table top game along the spectrum of such dice-rolling, encounter-centric, non-video games, managing to borrow key elements from both categories and merge them into an undeniably exciting gameplay experience. After two play sessions, I found myself genuinely wanting to play another round simply to witness the numerous other outcomes and combinations of events possible within the game’s world. Based heavily upon luck, nearly every aspect of the game, from the events that occur during gameplay to the actual game board itself, is presented to players via cards drawn from specific decks. As long as these decks are shuffled, then, every gameplay session has the potential to be vastly different, allowing a somewhat simple game (in terms of gameplay mechanics) to retain a respectable amount of replay value, even after the cards have begun to show wear and its rule booklet has turned to a disheveled, loosely-bound stack of papers.
The plot of Betrayal is, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner, quite stereotypical of the horror genre: the player assumes the identity of one member of a group of friends who have all wandered into a haunted house. Their initial goal is to simply explore the house, whether working together to overcome challenges, as real friends might, or acting more selfishly. Other than the initial tiles placed to represent each floor of the house—basement, ground and attic—every room of the house is drawn from a stack of tiles at the moment that a player steps onto it, giving each play session a sort of pseudo-randomly generated map. Each of these tiles has printed on its underside which floors of the house it can and cannot be placed in, as it would not follow for a courtyard to be in the basement, nor a kitchen in the attic—but a torture chamber? That could go anywhere.
Further, most new room tiles will have an emblem on them signifying that one of three types of cards must now be drawn: event, omen, or item. These typically give the player a new item, such as a dagger or cursed mirror, or force him or her into an event, such as being caught in a spider web. Some events are one-time only, while others are permanent within the house; some omens are as bad as they sound, while others are actually quite helpful; and, while most items are beneficial to the player, some are harmful and cannot willingly be dropped. Of particular interest are the omen cards, however, which act to drive the plot forward from the initial exploration stage into its climax—the “haunt.” Every time an omen card is drawn, that player rolls six dice, and if their roll is not higher than the amount of omen cards that have been drawn, they become the “traitor,” setting the haunt phase in motion.
The specifics of the haunt, defined in the rule booklet, are determined by the particular combination of room tile and omen card which initiated it, yet they all follow a basic formula: the traitor is now the antagonist, often working as an agent of some sort of monster or ghoul, and the rest of the friends must join together to stop the traitor’s plan. Unfortunately, in my own play sessions I never got to assume the role of the traitor, but of the two who did, one was revealed as a madman who had buried one of our friends alive, and the other discovered an alien ship and began working as their agent to control our minds and bring us onto the ship to be abducted. In the first instance, we had to race to locate and then dig up the buried friend before he or she died, and in the other, we were tasked with destroying the alien ship while avoiding the traitor-controlled aliens that began roaming the house. Both haunts posed very different problems for the remaining players, and, albeit within the bounds of the game’s mechanics, actually created somewhat distinct modes of gameplay, with each certainly favoring distinct character types.
As previously alluded to, players assume the identity of one of twelve somewhat average people, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses. These traits are represented via four major stats—might, speed, knowledge, and sanity. The first two, might and speed, are the “physical” stats; when a player takes physical damage, he or she can spread that damage evenly (or unevenly) across these two stats. The other two stats comprise the player’s mental health, and operate likewise when the player takes mental damage. If any one of these stats drops too low, it means death for the player. I played my first session as an eleven year-old, relatively strong but decidedly dimwitted boy, and the second time as a faster, more knowledgeable, yet weaker thirteen year-old. This choice of character is one of the few aspects of Betrayal that the player has total control over; as the game unfolds, however, stats which a player might have originally thought powerful may turn out to be useless, dependent entirely upon the cards that are drawn. For instance, in the session ending with the friend buried alive, we required someone with high knowledge to roll for finding the burial spot, and another with high strength in order to quickly dig the friend out. We nearly had these bases covered, with one player having chosen a professor character possessing high knowledge, but the brutish, muscled character who would have aided us most was actually the traitor himself—a bit of cruel irony that speaks toward the entertaining blend of choice and chance that the game creates.
To place the gameplay of Betrayal within a familiar frame, one might immediately reach for the likes of Clue or, possibly, even a few of the more deception or horror-based tabletop games, such as Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu. It certainly lends itself in no small part to the influence of these more veteran games, apparent within its similarly deceitful and cutthroat player diplomacy, as well as its overwhelmingly dark themes and grim outcomes. Essentially, if one were to remove the inherent micromanagement and verbose rule set of the traditional tabletop, stripping out its narrative freedom and replacing it with random events (with the added benefit of removing the need for a game master), that person would be looking at Betrayal. The game itself is a blast, and involves only a slight learning curve—even less so if you are already familiar with “skill checks” and dice-based gameplay. Although the limitations placed upon players within the game world can be stifling at times, such as when one player could not attempt to command his dog follower to bring him another item, they are still quite reasonable overall, and the trade-offs toward ease of access and playability make Betrayal worthy of any praise it receives—so long as the aforementioned spectrum from board game to tabletop game remains intact, never collapsing under the weight of the ‘middle-ground.’
This entry has been edited 3 times. It was last edited on Feb 10th, 2015 at 23:29:20.
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McSweens's Betrayal at House on the Hill (Other)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 5 February, 2015
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