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There is something
going on at the old house on the hill - and
there's a good chance that you're behind it
all!
Game Review:
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Published by
Wizards of the Coast
Designed by Bruce
Glassco and Rob Daviau
Edited by Brian
Campbell and Cal Moore
Art, graphics by
Peter Whitley, Kate Irwin, Rob Daviau, Trish
Yochum, Christopher Moeller, and Scott
Okumura
Rules, 2 haunt
books, 44 room tiles, entrance hall, 6
plastic figures, 6 two-sided characters
cards, 30 plastic clips, 8 dice, turn/damage
track, 13 omen cards, 22 item cards, 45
event cards, 291 tokens (large monsters,
monsters, event and room, item, trait roll),
$39.95
Comparisons to
Zombies!!!
and other (mostly Twilight
Encounters, Inc.-related
games) are inevitable, but if you’re looking
for a horror game, Betrayal at
House on the Hill
at least compares favorably.
The object of the
game is to be the first person or team to
achieve their objectives.
Does that mean
it’s a team game? Well, yes and no. You
start out as a single party, each player
using his own character to comb through the
old mansion in search of equipment and clues
that will help you beat the haunted home in
which you find yourselves trapped. Somewhere
along the way, though, the evil that dwells
here is going to reach a critical mass, and
when it does it will pervert one of the
hunters.
From that point,
the traitor has to do in his companions (or
bring about an apocalypse that will do the
dirty work for him, or…), and the survivors
(up to this point, anyhoo) have to stop his
dastardly plans or at least get the front
door open.
The game starts in
a long hallway that recalls the Bates Motel,
with doors and stairs and such leading off
in all directions. Everyone gets a figurine
that depicts their in-game persona, and
these move through new and unexplored
passages that turn up new rooms, areas, and
transit points. (There are six character
pieces to play, but in a clever little move
each one is two-sided and the illustrations
just vague enough that they all pull double
duty, giving you different people with
different skills to work with and keep
things fresh). The rooms are all on tiles,
thick cardstock pieces blindly flipped up
from a deck to create a new layout for each
game.
Rooms may provide
new items or even companions, but it’s also
a good bet you’ll stumble over threats and
challenges. Each trial is compared to one of
your statistics, and you roll dice equal to
that stat. The six-sided dice are different,
having zero, one, or two pips per side to
get your totals. Succeed and you may get new
goods, card draws, or perhaps just safe
passage. Some rooms, though, provide the
dreaded omens.
Omens aren’t bad
in their effects – not at first, in any case
– but when one of these is drawn, rolling
less than the current number of omen cards
in play turns someone at random into a
traitor and the endgame is underway. You may
become (or have to stop) the zombie lord,
for example, or have to fight/control a
swarm of rats. Both sides look into their
booklet – one for the bad guy, one for the
heroes’ team – and see what the code tells
you to do in order to see daylight or bring
about the darkness. There are 50 different
stories, so you won’t run out too quickly.
It’s another of
those pricey new Avalon Hill
boxed sets, but the components are plentiful
and all top-notch. The figurines are way
nifty, the card stock and illustrations
clean and crisp, and the box even has little
cardboard separators that form “pockets”
inside the box to store bits and pieces
(assuming you don’t need someone to point
this function out to you…ahem). There’s an
awful lot of punching out for the buyer to
do, so be ready to do a bit of grunt work
when you first crack the cover. The
characters have a little disk that shows
their skill sets, and small plastic sliders
are used to record these. They can go up or
down in the course of a game, and eventually
the friction of all these changes may wear
down the graphics (with a few uses it
doesn’t seem to do a lot of damage).
While it’s tough
to create a really horrific atmosphere just
sitting around a table, House on
the Hill
makes a gutsy effort. The cards are written
to be read aloud, making the players narrate
their adventures with creepy dialogue. The
omens are spooky, there are creepy little
graphics (do you really want to know what
made all those little scratches?), and the
cards make reference to each other in clever
ways that make it all that much more
surreal.
It’s not really a
new idea, or a terribly original execution,
but Betrayal at House on the
Hill is a
well-made, handsome boxed set with a good
bit of replay value, and is at least as
worthy as its competitors for the gamers’
dollars.
-- Andy Vetromile |
Betrayal at House on
the Hill (c) 2006 - Andy Vetromile |
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