Betrayal at House on the Hill is another excellent example of such a game, and it makes it hard to review as a consequence. Of COURSE I love it: it’s designed specifically to please the kind of gamer I am. However, a lot of people I know also love it, and most of them have rushed out to buy copies themselves, so clearly I am not alone. Also clear is that despite its popularity, this game also has a bad reputation amongst hobby gamers, certainly on the RPGNet forums. So I feel I have to speak up and join other reviewers in singing its praises. Genius should, after all, be lauded where it is found.
I’d say the reason most people who dislike BaHotH do so is because it’s mostly a storytelling game. This wouldn’t be so bad except that it is produced by Avalon Hill, who, about five years ago, got swallowed up by Wizards of the Coast, who in turn got swallowed up by Hasbro. The result was that Avalon Hill, the great Squadron Leader of high strategy, high tactics, rules-heavy, two-day-long, hex-grid, he-man wargaming, now produces games which make Pokemon seem hardcore. Quelle domage, but we must move with the times, and this game makes no attempts to present itself as anything other than what it is. If the Avalon Hill logo means anything, it means good quality cardboard things to punch out, and that is the case here. Unlike say, Eagle Games, who, while taking up the high-military games market, have come to be known for lots of plastic miniatures, and absolutely god-awful rules.
Punch-out fun indeed, as this game has some fifty tiles and about half a billion little coloured circles. This doesn’t make the game complex, however, because of the clever way it is designed. Each time the game plays differently, and thus each time you only need a tiny handful of these little discs.
The game is designed to emulate the path of a horror film. Each player plays a character exploring the eponymous House on the Hill. Six character cards are provided, each double-sided and colour-coded, so that the white figurine can represent both Professor Longfellow and Father Reinhart. While this does prevent the Professor and the Father arguing over reason vs faith, it does keep the cost down by only requiring the inclusion of six miniatures to represent twelve characters. A shame really, as the figures are excellent quality: plastic, yet extremely strong, easily identifiable yet full of character and small details. Although it might lack the sleek-feel wooden pieces of a German game, I cannot rate the components of this game highly enough. They are exceptional to look at, yet designed for maximum utility.
Each character has four statistics: Speed, Might, Sanity and Knowledge, and they are rated from 1 to 8. Four of the five sides of the character cards track these statistics, so that not only does each character begin at different levels, they go up and down at different rates, and with different maximums. This helps keep them unpredictable, so that no character ever becomes boring. The number in each stat indicates how many dice are rolled. These dice are six-sided, and labelled with no dots, one dot and two dots twice over. Thus if your Knowledge is 3, you roll 3 dice and can get a total between 0 and 6. Whatever effect prompted the roll tells you what level of success is needed.
Your current value in each stat is tracked with little plastic markers which clip onto each side of the card. These are a little hard to get on at first, and may dent the cardboard a little if you’re not careful, but once on, they work like a charm. All the characters are well-balanced, and have interesting personalities. Ox Bellows, the big dumb stoopid guy seems to be a perennial favourite.
All the characters begin in the Entrance Hall, which is on a tile that is laid down before the game starts. From there, they move throughout the house, drawing a new room tile every time they pass into a space without one, then drawing a card if instructed, to find out what is in that room. This is exactly the same principle used in the old Games Workshop game Dungeon Quest, and it works just as well here, but without all the annoying dead ends and constant death that made that game so frustrating.
Characters can explore three levels of this house, with each time its layout being completely different, due to the random tiles, and visiting such wonderfully creepy rooms as the Surgical Laboratory, the Pentagram Chamber and the mysterious Abandoned Room. In a room, a character may be asked to draw an Item, an Event or an Omen. Items are always good, and generally provide stat increases. Events usually involve a stat roll, failures decrease stats and successes raise them. Omens are typically items as well, but have another special function. After drawing one of them, the players roll six dice. If they roll less than the number of Omens drawn so far, then the second phase of the game begins. The randomness means you are never sure when that will begin – it could occur after just one Omen, or not occur until all thirteen are drawn.
The second phase – known as the Haunt - is where the true genius of the game lies. Depending on which Omen is drawn in which room, one of fifty different haunts occurs. Each one has its own unique story, its own unique rules and uses different sets of pieces. Each one also has a different system for selecting the Tratior - the player who performs the eponymous betrayal and gets to control the monsters. The game provides two rulebooks detailing all fifty of these scenarios, so the Traitor and the Heroes can read their respective descriptions in private. This means that neither side is sure of his opponents’ powers or victory conditions, making things even more surprising and, indeed, spooky.
The Heroes’ quests usually involve such things as killing all the monsters, or acquiring certain objects around the house and moving them to a specific room, or making a series of stat checks at various difficulties, or (usually) some combination of the three. The villains’ tasks will be similar, but they might now include killing all the players, or taking over the world with your giant sentient killer plant.
To recap: there are FIFTY different scenarios here, and all of them are different. They occur at a random moment in the game, with the house always different, with the characters different, with the powers they’ve acquired different, and with the traitor different every time. The replay value of this game is just insane. We’ve played it about thirty times in the last nine months and we’ve only had about five scenarios double up, but they’ve been so different each time you don’t notice. I was worried at first that this game would eventually tire out, but it doesn’t. Even the exploration part is always different, and the game never gets old. Not only do we play it almost every weekend, every time it comes out it always gets played twice or three times, as everyone just wants more.
There are some consequences of this randomness, though. Sometimes, the scenarios can be defeated very easily, because of how or when it comes out. Other times, it is effectively impossible (although not much – from our experiences, evil only wins about 20-30% of the time, even if he plays smart or gets lucky). Sometimes things are so random that the haunt doesn’t make any sense (and sometimes the rules are unclear, but this is remedied with an excellent errata on the website). Sometimes, as is often the case with games where things depend on making dice rolls to succeed, things can be very anti-climactic. And, with fifty of them, a few of the scenarios just aren’t very good. The one where you play Chess against Death is both dull and ridiculously easy to complete. Also easy is the one with Julius Caesar - but that one is funny. I mean, how often in life do you get to say something like “Oh my god! The homocidal little girl who thinks she’s Julius Caesar just got killed by the Toy Monkey!”?
And the beauty is that thinking you’re Julius Caesar is actually one of the more normal things that can happen in this house. Last weekend, we were attacked by a horde of rats, then had to stop a mummy getting married, and then had to stop the aliens from probing us all. We’ve fought blobs, sentient plants, demons, zombies, vampires, spectres, our own doppelgangers, evil servants, giant earth-swallowing snakes, Jack the Ripper, animated statues, animated body parts, a fire-breathing dragon and once, yes, a crazed killer weasel. We met the weasel in our third game and we still laugh ourselves silly remembering how it killed one player. And we still don’t know what half the tokens in the game mean – they stare at us enigmatically from their little baggies, with titles like “Toy Airplane” and “Crimson Jack”, not to mention a whole army of “Frog” tokens, and we dream about what wild adventures they may involve.
Not that it’s just silly options, of course. Other times, things will be really creepy, or produce classic horror stories. One time, we barricaded ourselves into the vault, shooting every zombie that came through the door. Other times, we’ve stopped the evil spell seconds before the house collapses around us, with only one of us left alive to walk away. The randomness of the outcomes means the story doesn’t always work so perfectly like its narrative inspiration, but this is a randomised board game, so the fact that it happens even once is a testament to this games’ genius.
This thrill of the new keeps bringing us back to the game, but it is not the only appeal. As time goes on, you also get the charm of the familiar, with wickedly hilarious cards like Toy Monkey, Mystic Coin, EGAMI NI EHT RORRIM and Jonah’s Turn now greeted by our group with cheers of happy recognition. We hold parties in the Mystic Elevator and have much love for the Ominous Kitchen. Of course, we do this with all our boardgames (for example, Puerto Rico is also known by us as the Cr0n-Trading Game) but the beauty of BaHotH is that it encourages this kind of play, and thrives on it. It is a game about wackiness and great storytelling and the wonder of never knowing what happens next – and yet, it achieves this without ever abandoning tactical game play and dice rolling mechanics entirely. It’s not just a storytelling device like Once Upon a Time – it’s actually a game as well. And a good game. Indeed, the more you play it smartly and concentrate on efficient solutions, the more you get close finishes, and at the same time, the tension of the dice rolls builds the tension of the narrative.
Much like, indeed, a good RPG.
Maybe that’s why I love it so much – it’s the closest thing we’ve ever seen to an RPG in the board game field. It’s as atmospheric as Space Hulk, as random as Talisman and as fun as HeroQuest, yet as quick and easy to learn as Apples to Apples. It’s also as social as Apples to Apples, as funny as Grave Robbers from Outer Space, as visceral as Zombies! and as replayable as Settlers of Catan. It is fun for all ages and almost all types of players, even non-geeks: anyone who’s ever seen a few horror films will get it and love it very quickly. It’s a glorious game, the kind you can safely carry everywhere you go because you know that everyone will enjoy it, and it will always provide good fun. Such reliability must be celebrated.
So why does it have a bad reputation? I can only think it is a category mistake. Just as hard-core wargamers condemn Settlers for being far too simplistic and involving way too much luck, hard-core strategy boardgamers condemn BaHotH for being too too narrative, too illogical, too lacking in perfectly balanced tactical challenges, every single time, thus being too easy to beat or too random to care about. Such people play games to win, and very often the joy of winning is more important than the joy of playing. I prefer games wherein the play is always equally fun, involving and rewarding, regardless of whether you are winning or losing (or even playing at all). Thankfully, more and more of these games are being produced, and BaHotH is one of the greatest examples thereof. It is a game designed so that winning is less important than laughing, and it excels at this.
To call it a bad game because of this is just ridiculous. It may indeed be a poor strategy game. But it is a storytelling game of wonderful brilliance, and as such, a first-class game in the general sense. In any sense. Get it, before the Toy Monkey gets you. CHING! CHING! CHING!
Style: 5 Substance: 5
