Tonight a small gang of would-be gamers met at Joe's place for a round of Betrayal at House on the Hill. I've had the game for a while now and if you're at all familiar with it, you know something of the complexity inside that glossy cardboard box. First of all there are something like 179 individual cardboard tokens, representing various creatures and objects, 3 decks of cards, a stack of room tiles, character boards and tokens, and a handful of dice.
Chaos in a box.
The great thing about the game is that there are 50 different scenarios and the house that you're in is never the same twice. Tonight there were six of us, including two that had never played. For the most part things went smoothly, only having to consult the rules, and errata once or twice.
When the game was first released there were a number or errors and omissions in the rules of the game, which have mostly been fixed in a file you can print out and stick in the box. I've found that having all that information at hand is a great help when problems come up.
The premise of the game is that you're all friends who, for whatever reason, all enter a rather large, haunted looking mansion.
The house happens to be on a hill, I guess.
It's probably raining too.
Anyway, you all start off on the same team, and players take turns exploring new rooms and dealing with whatever the house throws at them. At some point in the game an event will take place that will cause one player to turn against everyone else and you find out which of the 50 scenarios you're dealing with.
It's a complex game, but it's also a lot of fun and definitely a favorite in our group.
Tonight, I ended up being the Traitor. I won't bore you with the details but leave it at this: I lost the game by one dice roll. I needed four and rolled a three. The one remaining hero (I'd managed to kill the other four) claimed victory and sent my minions and me on our way.
Jack is a Very Happy Boy!
