Betrayal at House on the Hill
3-6 players
Age 12+
60 Min playing time
Medium complexity
In Betrayal at House on the Hill, you will play as one of three to six friends who are exploring a haunted house. But before the exploration is finished, one of you will turn on the others. Betrayal!
The game starts off with character selection. Each available character has predetermined statistics for things like speed, strength and will, and each character card is double sided. Then for the set up, you lay out a base tile for the different levels of the house that you can explore and the house is built turn by turn by random tile draw. The tiles themselves make up the VERY SPOOKY rooms of the house. They'll have unique room types, doorways indicating which way you'll be able to explore, and some will also have prompts to draw cards. These cards may grant you special items that will help your character later; some will trigger horrifying events that take place; but some of the cards contain OMENS, that can be either good or bad, but always signify the oncoming betrayal. Each time an omen card is pulled, you roll a set of dice, trying to get a number higher than the number of omen cards that have been pulled so far in the game. Once the total rolled than the number of omen cards, the betrayal takes place and the haunt begins!
The betrayer is determined at random, according to which omen was the last drawn, and which room it was found in. There are fifty haunt scenarios. Fifty! That's tons! Once the betrayer has been identified, that player can flip to the corresponding instructions in a special book and leave the room to find out how they're supposed to betray their former friends, while the rest of the group reads the same haunt's instructions in a different book that will detail how they'll survive the night. And then the rest of the game is a spooky one versus all rush to survive.
All in all, I love this game. I love reading the cards out in my spookiest voice. I love cackling evilly when I'm drawn as the betrayer. I love heroically defending myself against the various dangers when I'm not. This thematically spooky game is a really great time. If you're looking for an hour of Octoberpropriate fun, this is it. I hope you try it and enjoy it as much as I do.
(And if you DO enjoy Betrayal at House on the Hill, there's a legacy version. Spoiler alert: I loved Betrayal Legacy even more than Betrayal at House on the Hill.)
