Revisiting the House on the Hill
There’s been recent mention in a couple places on this blog about a board game called Betrayal at House on the Hill. It’s a horror-themed board game in which players cooperatively explore a haunted house until they trigger some pivotal event and “the Haunt begins.” Then one of the players turns against the others and, depending on how it started, you play one of many different scenarios, each with its own story, goals, and special rules.
I’m rather fond of the game. In fact, I’ve created a collection of 20 new scenarios for it, which you can find over here. You’ll also find some musings on Haunt design (also partially applicable to strategy) and some reference tables I used while doing it.
I also made a WarCraft 3 Map inspired by the board game for Blizzard’s 2006 Halloween mapping contest, though it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. Turns out that introducing a bunch of new rules and objectives half-way through the game doesn’t go over as well in a real-time Internet game as in a turn-based face-to-face one. Who’d have thought?
Tommi said,
April 9, 2008 at 4:47 am
House is kind of fun, but it has pretty high probability of becoming anticlimatic when the traitor is set; often, far too easy, sometimes far too hard, sometimes just fine.
Are you familiar with the Warcraft 3 custom scenario where everyone builds villages and at the first night some player turns out to be something very evil, like Dracula or werewolf? It is somewhat similar in concept. I don’t remember the name of the map, though, but a friend played it more than a few times.
Colleen said,
April 10, 2008 at 1:18 am
It’s an awesome game; balance issues do virtually always mess up the haunt, but the concept and the execution of everything else redeem the whole game. (Also, call me wierd, but I like the mansion-exploring part of the game better than the haunt anyway.) Main trouble is it’s one of those games that always ends up being a lot of explaining and a whole lot of planning for the amount of actual gameplay.
Tyler said,
November 23, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Happily, it appears Betrayal is getting a new edition, which will correct some or all of the balance issues, one hopes.
Bruce Glassco posted about it on Boardgamegeek: http://rpg.geekdo.com/thread/466307