Critical Brit #2: Betrayal At House On The Hill Review

Welcome, dear reader, as the nights draw in and and halloween draws closer so too does the creeping horror and suspense of this review, Betrayal at House on the Hill. Enter if you dare!

Betrayal is a haunted house themed exploration role playing game for three to six players who have decided to explore that creepy old house on the hill. You take turns exploring a sprawling decrepit mansion as one of the dozen characters available, each with a different set of strengths & weaknesses (might, knowledge, speed & sanity). These are used as appropriate events transpire, such as opening a safe (knowledge) or moving past rubble (might) etc. As players move from the foyer deeper into the house they take a room card from the room deck placing it, as best you can, in the space you moved to revealing a new room, a room that might be quite innocent, just a corridor perhaps, or a bedroom, or something far more sinister.

As you each explore, new rooms may have markings that signify an event occurs as you enter. These are Items, Events, or Omens. The player takes an appropriate card, reads it aloud and resolves as required. You might find a candle, something to push back the darkness and raise your sanity or perhaps a voice calls to you from beneath the floor making you dig frantically in the dirt. Will you find something useful or lose some sanity at discovering a new horror?

You continue expanding the house as you explore the ground floor, attic and basement finding items and gaining/losing stats until you find an omen room. These play the same as other rooms except once revealed you must make a Haunt roll. You roll six of the special betrayal dice (they have 0, 1 & 2) and if you roll more than the number of omen cards revealed so far the game and the exploration continues until the next omen card. Once a haunt roll is failed the game is about to change dramatically. The relatively safe exploration is over and the “haunt” begins…

At this mid point in the game you have to consult the survivor/traitor book to see what evil has been unleashed on the house and who has betrayed the others. There are 50 different “haunts” to try to survive based on what omen was found in what room, so you’re going to have plenty of replayability before having the same one again and with the random layout of the house it’s still going to be different. It’s like that scene from Cabin In The Woods **SPOILERS** where they decide if it’s redneck murder zombies or dracula or inbred redneck murder zombies. There’s too many to choose from! (not that you actually get to choose).
For this review, I’ll give details in the SPOILERS paragraph at the end of this review of the last game I played as an example, but if you want to avoid any potential spoilers then I’ll just say that the haunt means usually one player (as written in the haunt book) becomes “the evil baddie” who has lured the other players to the house in order to betray them. The survivors and the haunted both have separate books describing what they have to do to win. However, they don’t necessarily have to tell the other side what that is.

The exploration phase can be a little “samey” after a few games, but knowing that what is coming is truly unexpected keeps it fresh as long as you wonder if being alone when the haunt happens will leave me easy prey or was sticking in a group just saving the killer from having to search far for their victims.

Betrayal is a relatively simple game that is easy to pick up despite how daunting it may look in some of the pictures. The game comes with a book containing 50 different haunts that may occur in the second half and some need certain markers, so while there is a lot to unbox you only play one haunt per game and most of the tokens stay in the box at any one sitting. My only minor quibbles with it would be the quality of some of the components (at least in the 2nd edition I have, but I think it’s been updated since so mileage may vary). The figures, while painted are small & not particularly well moulded. Several of the tokens needed cutting out with a craft knife and the player stat cards needed me to make a backing card to stop the stat markers just falling off (something really important in a game with player stats). That said it is relatively cheap for how much you get in the box at around £35 or $40 so a few rough edges make sense and doesn’t detract from the fun once you get going.

Betrayal is played best with four or five people but if you only have two you can double up and play two characters each. With all players wanting to have an adventure, leaning into the game, and playing the role of the character you choose, doing the voices etc. So, set the scene, close the curtains, dim the lights, put some spooky music on YouTube, even dress up if you feel like it, and you’ll have a couple of terrifically terrifying hours entertainment regardless of how the evenings horror finally plays out. Will you survive the madness & escape or become a minion to Dracula and drain your friend’s blood for supper?

***** beware all ye who scroll beyond this point Spoilers lie in wait for thee. Continue at your peril *****

Myself and my 10 year old played the game with one extra character that we’d agree on moving together reaching the 3 player requirement. I was Professor Longfellow, a clever older gent with a penchant for fine wine, and the kid played Zoe Bergstrom, a plucky young kid with a teddy bear. We chose Ox Bellows, the quarterback punk to play between us and began to explore this creepy old mansion together. I headed upstairs and the other two covered the ground floor. After quickly finding a way to the cellar Ox headed downstairs to cover more ground & to follow the classic horror trope of splitting up. After about 30 minutes exploration, and some good item finds, a particularly bad roll triggered the haunt somewhat early.

After looking it up, it was revealed that OX had lured us to the house in order to sacrifice us to a demon and, in return, had already been made immortal! We couldn’t harm him directly, our survivor book said we had to give a sacred item to a stone statue in the basement that could take him on. On the plus side, despite his searching the basement area, he hadn’t discovered any of the rooms he needed to sacrifice one of us in. On the down side, of the four items we needed to stop him two were already carried by the now unstoppable Ox. So our frantic searches began. After a couple of rounds luck dropped on the survivors side as Zoe found the bell on the ground floor in the conservatory. As the survivors headed to the statue, Ox also found the pentagram room and was now on the hunt for the first one of us he could find. Zoe made a dash down stairs to the cellar as I used a previously discovered secret corridor to attempt to slow Ox down. This did not go terribly well as, axe in hand, he killed me first try with one hit. All I’d managed to do was give him a victim closer to the sacrifice room! While he was picking-up my body, Zoe placed the bell in the statue’s hand and it headed to stop the sacrifice from taking place. It reached Ox in the next room and began to slow him down by draining his life force (movement stat) but as we did the math it would take three turns to defeat him and in that time he could reach the sacrifice room. So Zoe confronted Ox slowing him down even more (an enemy in the same room reduces movement by half). Two lucky rounds of combat later, a surprisingly lightly scratched Zoe watched as the statue finally drained the energy out of Ox and he turned to stone where he stood, only two rooms away from his evil goal.

At this point I decided to house rule it and I flipped a room card, “crash!! The house is beginning to collapse. Roll a dice”. The kid rolled a two so I flipped two more rooms on each floor. “You have to get out before you are crushed, you have to roll an extra dice each turn to see how much falls down”. The kid said she wouldn’t leave me so began to carry me. “Roll two dice”. A lucky zero meant she was safe this turn. As she slowly kept moving, I kept flipping more and more cards chasing her out the house with falling masonry in a convenient square card form. Most of the rooms were destroyed as she dragged me out into the dawn light. Then (house ruling again for the fun) I said my character was dead, unless she had any magic healing items (I knew she did) “OK use the item” I said, she made the roll on the card….and failed, the professor didn’t stir. “no, I didn’t use this thing right” she said “I need to do it like this” she rerolled and got the score she needed. The professor began to stir. They had both survived the Betrayal At House On The Hill and, by leaning into it a bit, we both had a bunch of fun.

So that’s Betrayal. It’s a fun role playing game that might take a bit more than your traditional board games, but if one of you has played before or reads up on it a bit, and you all lean into it, you can have a bunch of great adventures. If it sounds like your kinda thing, go check it out.

Special thanks to our resident Critical Brit @Steboost

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