Game day was crazy! Everyone decided tonight was a good night to play. There were too many people to play any one game. We split up into two groups. The games we played were Betrayal at House on the Hill and Risk 2210. I opted to play Betrayal at House on the Hill instead of risk so I’m going to focus on that game.
Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game that is very dynamic. The board (aka the house) is built at random one room at a time by laying down room cards to explore new rooms. There are artifacts to find and haunted events that happen depending on the type of room. Each of the character cards have different starting levels of mental and physical abilities. The abilities come into play when the player needs to perform a die roll to overcome a haunted room or do battle with a monster. Depending on who and were the haunt is triggered the game gets split into two groups. One person becomes the betrayer and receives one secret objective and the remaining players are given a secret objective. Normally the betrayer has to prevent the other players from doing something, finding an artifact, escaping the house, etc.
JK, BE, and I played the first game. It didn’t last too long, JK (with beginners luck on his side) became the betrayer. He turned into an evil rat lord who needed to get to a special room to complete a ritual to kill BE and I. He also had about 6 rat tokens on the board to slow our advance, but it was all for not. The room that he needed to get to just happened to be right next to the room where he was. So he was able to get into the room, complete the ritual and kill us without much of a fight.
More people played the second game because two of the Risk 2210 players left in mid game leaving the games in shambles for CF and MR.
The second game was pretty intense. Within the first or second torn the haunt was revealed and MR become the betrayer. His goal was to protect some demons and get them to kill everyone using a special ring. As a group we managed to kill MR and get his ring. I was the best person to use it because I was the Priest. My mental ability was high but I had been wounded by MR before he was destroyed. By the time I got the ring I was too weak to get into position to do any damage.
JK found a hand gun item and was running around trying to shoot the demons. It didn’t work very well because the demon lord can’t be hurt or stunned by fighting. CA was on an expedition to find items in unexplored parts of the house. JK decided to do the same in another part of the house. That just left BA to reclaim the ring, fight the demons, get out of the basement, and get within a hairs distance of doing damage to the demon lord. He had some incredible die rolls but it ran out right at the end. In the end, evil won again. :(
Betrayal at House on the Hill is great, its a very structured game but allows for some very interesting plots and interactions among the players. The turns are fairly quick and the game moves along easily.
Pictures to follow…..