I picked up the box. It felt meaty and had a lot of exciting sounds inside it. The box art was passable, but the shot on the back enticed me: fully pre-painted miniatures included! Fifty scenarios! From the initial glance, it looked a lot like a some fiendishly entertaining cross between HeroQuest and Call of Cthulhu.
And, guess what! My initial glance proved to be a very, very accurate impression.
Contents:
1 Rulebook Well, I should hope so.
2 Haunt Books Not much to look at, but very important!
44 Room Tiles Absolutely gorgeous, full color, heavy stock, yum.
1 Entrance Hall Tile Basically three room tiles in one, to start the house off.
6 Plastic Character Figures Fully painted! About the quality of MageKnight minis, really. Very exciting to see them in a board game!
6 Two-sided Character Cards Shaped like pentagons, with tracks of stat numbers around the outside. The cards correspond to a certain figure, but have two different characters, one per side. So each figure is two people, and you choose which person to be, with different stats.
30 Plastic Clips Used to keep your place on the stat-tracks around character cards, and to keep track on the Turn/Damage Track.
8 Dice Six siders, with two sides showing two pips, two sides showing one pip, and two sides showing absolutely no pips. These were the first things that I noticed when I opened the box. I'm a sucker for interesting dice.
1 Turn/Damage Track Used for various scenarios to track time or other things that need to be tracked. It's a long cardboard thing, with the numbers 1-10 on it, and you use a clip to point at numbers. Pretty simple, this.
13 Omen Cards Tarot-proportioned cards. Not really any art. Nicely designed for that, though. Heavy, thick cards. Beefy!
22 Item Cards See above, though these are all illustrated with a very simple black-ink sketch of the item.
45 Event Cards Also mostly artless, very similar to Omen Cards.
291 Tokens, including: 12 large circular monster tokens, with art; 204 circular monster tokens, without art; 14 square event and room tokens; 43 pentagonal item tokens; 18 triangular trait roll tokens Mostly the tokens are easy-to-spot-on-the-board little thingies, with bright white text to identify various things slithering or laying about the mansion.
The game works like this: At the start, everyone picks a figure, and chooses which character they'll play (of the two each figure can represent). They set the starting stats for that character using the sliding clips. The four stats are: Might (for beatin' fools), Speed (for moving about the board), Knowledge (for completing various events), and Sanity (for surviving certain Event Cards, and to withstand Psychic attacks). I have to admit, as a Lovecraft junkie, a Sanity trait was what made me buy this game at first. The four stats are paired off, too: Might and Speed are Physical Traits, and Sanity and Knowledge are Mental Traits. This is important to note, because certain things in the House on the Hill (some Events, some dangerous rooms, and combat, among them) can injure characters. More often than not this damage is Physical rather than Mental, but the mechanic is the same: when you take X amount of Y type of Damage, you have to go down that many "spots" on the pair of traits of Y type, to be divided as you see fit.
That sounds confusing. Example: My character takes 2 Mental Damage from a horrible something or other. I can take both both "hits" to Sanity, or both to Knowledge, or put one hit in Sanity and one in Knowledge- any of these will satisfy 2 Mental Damage coming my way. Characters have various trait progressions, and are better in some traits than others, so that losing one Sanity for one character might mean a drop from 4 to 3, while another character might drop from 5 to 3 in a single hit. This is because damage is by number of spaces on a character's trait track, not the actual numerical value of the trait. As a sub-example. Darrin "Flash" Williams has a Sanity progression of 7 5 5 5 4 3 2 1 (skull), and starts at 3. So if he took one Mental Damage at the start and decided to put it in Sanity, he'd go down to two. On the other hand, if he gained three Sanity, he'd go up three "clicks," to the second 5 on the track. His Sanity would be 5, and would remain so if he gained yet another Sanity point.
If, at any time, any one of your characters traits moves to the SKULL icon, your character is dead. Note that this can NOT happen before the Haunt begins, so that all the damage in the world will never lower a character below their lowest slot in a stat before all Hell breaks loose.
Phew!
Now someone lays out the starting tiles for the three floors: for the ground floor, the three-part Entrance Hall; for the upper floor, the Upper Landing; and for the basement, the Basement Landing. All the figures start in the Entrance Hall. The character with the next birthday (as listed on their character cards . . . cute) goes first, with play proceeding clockwise.
During a turn, each character can do various things:
- Move through a number of rooms equal to their Speed value, though movement ends if the Explorer has to draw a card (and when entering a new room, you almost always have to draw a card).
- Discover a new room. When your Explorer goes through a door on the board that leads to empty table space, he or she has discoverd a new room. You take the top room tile from a face-down stack and, if the back indicates it's on the proper floor (some tiles work on just a single floor, some two, some all three), you flip it over and line up one of its doors with the door you've just come through. If the back doesn't match the floor you are exploring, you discard it, and keep going until you find one that does match.
- Attempt a die roll. Mostly this applies to Items and Omens, some of which allow you to roll a number of dice equal to your score in a given trait, to beat a difficulty number set by that Item or Omen, to activate certain effects.
- Use Items or Omen Cards. Some Items and Omens are always in effect, but others need to be activitated in certain ways, or are one-use cards that get discarded.
- Attack, but only once per turn, and only after the Haunt starts, more on this below.
So the Explorers take turns mucking about, discovering new rooms. Most new rooms have an icon on them that represents one of the three card types: spirals for Events, bull heads for Items, and birds for Omens. After entering the room (and following any of the special rules printed on the card, which are mostly self-explanatory- my favorite is the Collapsed Room, which could send you sprawling into a new room in the basement), the player draws the appropriate card and reads it aloud immediately. If it's an Item, he or she now has that item. Ca-ching! If it's an Event, he or she follows the rules on the card. Events can be really helpful, really harmful, or just plain weird. A lot of them call for Trait Rolls, as described above. It's the Omen cards that deserve special mention.
Omen cards are like a cross between Items and Events. They represent something you find in the House on the Hill which further the "plot." This could be anything, from a strange Ring which allows you to make Psychic attacks to a raving Madman who befriends you (and follows you around as a companion, adding to your Might but taking away from your Sanity).
Omens also trigger the Haunt Roll. Whenever someone draws an Omen card, after doing what it says, he or she rolls six dice. If the roll comes up less than the total number of Omen cards drawn thus far in the game, a Haunt has started- and the game shifts mechanics drastically.
The person who thus activated the Haunt (the "Haunt Revealer," in game terms) picks up one of the two Haunt books ("Secrets of Survival" or "Traitor's Tome") and looks at the charts on the inside cover. Which Haunt happens (numbered from one to fifty) depends on what room the character was in upon activating the haunt, and which Omen card was drawn this turn. The Haunt will list someone who is a traitor- something like "Darrin 'Flash' Williams" (if he's in play, and if he's not, there will be an alternative listed) or "The Haunt Revealer," etc. That person gets the Traitor's Tome and leaves the room to study the Haunt that has started. That player is the Traitor, and is now the Bad Guy. The rest of the players are now Heroes, and huddle around to read the appropriate Haunt in the Secrets of Survival book.
Both sides will be told what to do to set up for the Haunt, and be given the victory conditions for their side, along with any special rules they need to know (and keep secret from the other side, if at all possible). Once both groups are pretty certain they know what they are doing, everyone reconvenes around the table, and play restarts with the player to the Traitor's left.
A few rules always change when a Haunt starts. First, the option to Attack is now open. Second, movement is hindered by opponents, so that for each opponent (someone from the "other side," so this works against the Traitor, too) in a room you enter or start in, your Speed is reduced by one that turn. So if I have a Speed of 6 and start in a room with two opponents, I actually have a Speed of 4 for this turn, and if I enter the next room and there is an opponent there, my speed is actually 3 for this turn, and I've used one of those points just moving to the new room. It's hard to move through fights, and often leads to showdowns in a central room, for the climax of the story. And, characters can now lose that last point in a trait, killing them.
The turns are now played exactly the same (within any new rules set by the Haunt), but now with the added bonus of being able to Attack others, including the fiendish monsters that the Traitor can probably now control as part of his new-found powers (which also include not having to activate special room effects when he or she enters those rooms, among other benefits!. An attack is usually done with Might, with the attacker rolling his Might attack and the defender ALSO rolling Might. The higher roll wins the combat, and the low roller takes the difference as Might damage.
The tricky part is that while the Traitor is still for all intents and purposes still (usually) just a regular Explorer (and thus can be killed with enough clobbering), monsters almost never die. They can be stunned, and run from, and defeated in esoteric ways, but you can almost never clobber them to death. Also, killing the Traitor might not at all be your goal- very often the Traitor will die, but the player of the Traitor still controls the monsters on the board, and can end up killing off all the Heroes to win the game.
That's pretty much the meat of the game.
Before I ramble on about how much I absolutely adore this game and want to enter a common-law marriage with it, I shall point out the few minor problems I have with it. There's some printing errors. Some monster stats were simply left out of the Traitor's Tome, requiring a quick trip to the Avalon Hill website to find out the correct stats (after digging around the forums). Also, one room tile (The Underground Lake) has an "Upper Level only" tile-back, when in reality it's supposed to be a "Basement Level only" tile. This is nothing a quick house rule wouldn't fix with ease, but it's a little irksome. The components are of the highest quality, but the included make-it-yourself tray doesn't do a very good job of keeping them in their compartments, since the dividing walls have gaps below them just wide enough to let the tokens shift around to visit their neighbors. And, finally, putting the clips on the character cards and the Turn/Damage Track can do a bit of edge-damage to the cardboard. There is a knack to it, though; slide the clips on sideways, on the corner of the cardboard piece. Ah well.
Now, the love:
I have to say, this game doesn't outright say it's supposed to re-create horror films, but that is exactly what it ends up doing, and doing better than any other game I've played that claims to. Three to six people enter an abandoned old house, for God-knows-what-reason, and begin to explore it (even after running into spooky things right away, of course). Then, one person unhinges, triggering all sorts of nasty mojo . . . and everyone tries to survive the madman. It's an interesting dynamic, because sometimes, story-wise, the Traitor isn't EVIL, just misunderstood ("No! Stop killing these man-eating vines! We need to study them! GET AWAY!").
The game seems fairly well balanced, even more so with some of the errata popping up on the Avalon Hill message boards. The Traitors and Heroes seem to always have about an equal chance to win, though the Heroes have to deal with something the Traitor doesn't: not knowing what their allies will do. The Heroes have to organize to win, and at the same time they want to hide their motives from the Traitor. This quickly leads to silent mouthings, quick pointing-at-things when the Traitor is off getting a soda, and other such things. I actually really like this aspect of the game.
The end of the game always seems to come down to one or two surviving Heroes making a final last stand against the forces of evil amassing in the House. There's almost always some sort of building tension- sometimes more and more monsters are showing up. During one scenario, the house begins to collapse, room by room. This gives the Heroes a very limited time to do what they need to do to beat the Traitor and the House. Towards the end, the game can actually become scary, with death creeping closer and more and more of your allies dropping like flies . . .
I really, really like the shift in the middle of the game from exploration to survival. And so far, none of the scenarios have disappointed. Eventhough I'm certain you'd repeat scenarios before you played all fifty, they'll never get extremely stale, because the house layout is different, the characters are different, the Items in play are different, the person who becomes the Traitor is probably different, and people will react to the Haunt differently.
I like that no one can die before the Haunt starts, so you always have a full compliment of Heroes (perhaps badly wounded, perhaps beefed up from Items and special Rooms) to confront the Traitor.
This is one of the few board games I've played that I can play multiple sessions of in a single sitting. I highly, highly, highly reccomend this game to any horror buff, or anyone who like tile-based board games.
