Board Game Analysis: Betrayal at House on the Hill
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The assignment continues! Like last time, we were tasked to play and analyse a board game. This week, we decided to play the game Betrayal at House on the Hill. It is a turn-based game for between 3 and 6 people, and can be summarized as “explore a haunted house together, until one of you becomes a traitor, than defeat the traitor”.
The game uses eight special die 6-sided die, where two of the sides are blank, two contain one dot each, and the last two contain two dots each. Before the game starts, each player decides on which character they want to play. There are six different character pieces, and six character cards, with one character on each sides, for a total of 12 different characters. Each character has four different stats (Speed, Might, Sanity and Knowledge), with 8 levels in each. Depending on what level you are in a stat, you get to roll varying amounts of dice for checks in that stat. For example, if I’m Zoe Ingstrom, I start with 3 in Might. This means that I get to roll a total of 3 dice if a Might check comes up. If I gain one point in Might, I instead get to roll 4 dice. Your speed decides how many tiles you get to move each turn, if you’re not afflicted by any movement slowing effect. If you go below the lowest level in any one stat during the haunt (explained below), you die and can’t participate in the game any more. If the game hasn’t reached a haunt yet, your stat simply doesn’t fall below the lowest level. Damage in this game is somewhat special. It is either dealt directly to one specific stat (this is most often found in events and rooms), or it is dealt as physical damage or mental damage. Physical and mental damage allows you to split the damage between the two stats (speed/might respectively sanity/knowledge) in any way that you want. If you take 4 physical damage, you could put all 4 damage into might, or you could split it 2/2 into speed and might, or however you choose to distribute it. Attacks in this game are more or less just a stat check. You roll the amount of dice according to your Might stat, or in rare cases, any of the other stats. The defender then rolls his or her amount of dice, and the damage dealt is equal to the difference between your rolls. Example: I’m Zoe again, and I roll a total of 3 with my three dice. The defender then rolls 5 with his six dice. I then end up taking 2 physical damage. The game starts out with three tiles placed a fair bit from each other. These are the Entrance Hall/Foyer/Grand Staircase, Basement Landing and Upper Landing-tiles. Each of these tiles has a number of doors, which you can choose to explore through. You then discover a new room. When you discover a new room, you go through the pile of 42 (minus placed tiles) tiles until you find one that belongs on the current floor, indicated by the graphic on the back side. You then place the tile at any rotation you want, as long as one door is connected to the door you just passed through. If a tile has text on it (a special room), you do what the text says. If a room you discover has one of three marks on it, you stop there and draw the respective card, else you can continue moving. All three kinds of cards do more or less the same thing (that is, modify your stats, or move you to another room, or something of the kind). The difference between them is that items and some omens can be used at will, while events and the rest of the omens happen as soon as you pick them up. Die rolls are often used to determine the outcome of cards (how and what stats are modified, what room you are placed in, and so on). Examples are:
Every time an omen card is drawn, after the instructions on the card have been followed, a haunt roll is done. The drawing player rolls 6 die, and if the result of the die rolls is lower than the number of drawn omen cards, a haunt begins. The game consists of 50 different haunts, which are basically different scenarios. Depending on which omen triggered the haunt, and where the haunt was triggered, a different haunt is chosen. At this point, a traitor is also picked. The traitor is the “bad guy” of the haunts, as indicated by the title. As each haunt has different rules and goals, the roles of the explorers and the traitor varies. We played two different haunts, #29 Frankenstein’s Legacy and #47 Worm Ouroboros. In #29, the explorer’s roles were to kill Frankenstein’s Monster, by either pushing him down in two specified tiles via a Might check, or by hitting him with torches found in four of the rooms. The traitor’s role was to kill every one of us. In haunt #47, the explorer’s roles were to kill the two heads of Ouroboros, which were invincible until you got the Skull omen item and rolled a 6+ Sanity roll against the head. At that point, that head could be attacked and killed. The traitor’s (who had turned into Ouroboros, and controlled his heads) role was to enter 16 different rooms with his two heads, at which point he would have “materialized” enough to crush the house, and then proceed to crush the planet. This game is all about randomness. Everything from the house layout, to the dice rolls, to what haunt gets played is based on randomness. Hell, if you want, you can even randomize which characters everyone gets (and by extension, what stats they start with) by shuffling them out of sight. This makes the game really fun, since it can produce lots and lots of both positive and negative “that was close” moments. However, it is also the bad side of the game. While most of the damage you can take is somewhat negligible if you only get hit once, having bad luck several times in a row basically means you’re out. For example, if you explore a room and stumble upon a stat check, you roll to see if you pass it. If you fail, the game more often than not makes you take some damage in that stat. Then you explore further from that room, and up in a dead end, so you have to walk back through the skill check room, and roll again. Since you took damage from it earlier, it is now much harder to succeed at the roll, since you have one or two less dice (depending on character, stat and level in that stat), causing you to take even more damage. This means you are severely crippled in that stat for basically the rest of the game, since many stat gains also require you to roll above a certain number. For me, the most interesting system was the haunt system. It completely transforms a game that was somewhat relaxed and slow-paced in the exploration phase, to a game of tactics and deceit in the haunt phase. The fact that it was also double-randomized in the sense that both the triggering room and the triggering omen decided which haunt got played made it even more exciting, since you’re quite likely to end up with something new (until a certain point). The varying rules also made for an interesting twist at the end of the game, instead of the typical “oh, we’re almost done? Lets just keep doing the exact same thing for a couple more rounds”. A close contender would be the exploration system. Having just a small base to start from, and then completely randomizing the layouts of the floors makes the game feel fresh every playthrough. It really gives the feeling of exploring a house that no one has entered in ages. It’s also what drives the game forward, in the sense that you get a bit of story from the cards (and in some cases, the room itself has some extra story in the rule book), and that it triggers the haunt. This system is also what I’d consider the core system of the game, since it is what makes it unique (along with the haunt), and many things somewhat ties into it. The box states people aged 12 and up. I feel it should perhaps be a bit below that, since the systems and mechanics are fairly simple and straight forward. While the story written on the various game pieces is kind of complex, it tells you exactly what to do in a short, bullet-point format below. The rulebook even states that if a card or room breaks a rule, you should still follow what’s written on the card or room, which means that you don’t have to check in the rulebook every five minutes to see if you’re breaking a rule somehow. The story, however, is kind of deep and disturbing. While not pictured, the texts on everything can be quite grotesque. For example, when Ouroboros was summoned (haunt #47), it is written out how the traitor thrashes around, until he eventually bends backwards and two large snakes burst from his abdomen. Probably not what you’d want to expose to someone below 10 years old. So if I was deciding on what age to put on the box, I’d probably set the age at 11 or 12 and higher, depending on my mood that day or something like that. The game was really fun to play, and I’m even considering purchasing a copy for myself. The exploration is beautifully done, and gives you the sense of navigating through an old unmapped house, and combined with the haunt system, it makes sure that no two playthroughs are exactly the same. TL;DR: Simple and straightforward rules, randomness are the good and bad sides, exploration is the core system, haunt is the most interesting system, my recommended age is 11 or 12 and up.
Lastly, I apologize for the delayed post. I was busy exhibiting at DreamHack Stockholm, and didn’t have the time nor the motivation to write this earlier.
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