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Betrayal at House on the Hill is the Best Board Game

Greetings all, Nerdarchist Ted here to bring you, hopefully, into an awesome board game.  Betrayal at house on the Hill by Avalon Hill a sub company of Wizards of the Coast, or as I like to call it Horror Movie the board game.

A brief synopsis of the game is you are a group of people who stumble upon a house and decide to explore it.  The front door locks behind you and you are forced to explore to find a way out.  Some time after you start exploring the house, things go crazy and one of your party members turns evil.  It is then one player versus the rest.

Now before I get into the actual scope of the game let me give you some back ground on me and an amusing story about this wonderful board game.

I am a huge board game fanatic and I am always looking to play new games as well as keep playing the current favorite.  If you guys like me to review the games I play please let me know and I can make this a regular series and use this as an excuse to acquire and play new and cool games.  Feel free to make your recommendations as well.

As to the the funny story, as I stated I am a lover of board games and around the Christmas holidays many years ago gave me a call telling me that what he was giving me for our annual holiday exchange was something that I would like and that I would have to just trust him on it.

By the time came for us to exchange our gifts I had forgotten about our phone call.  I opened the package with all the usual vigor and when I got into the actual gift I turned it over and read the box–>>

The confusion and disappointment was evident on my face.  My friend assured me that it would be well worth it.  And I was so glad that I trusted my friend.  We played our first game and you would think I would love it out of the box, but I had the worst luck of all.

 Betrayal at House on the Hill (Game Play)

First turn I explored a room got caught in a spider web and spent the next three turns trying to escape.   In that amount of time the haunt happens, I will explain that in a bit, and then the other 2 survivors solve the puzzle in time for me to get out of the web and not be able to help.  We won the game, but I was not loving the game at this point.

I gave it a second try, had much better luck and it quickly moved to the top of my board game list.

Alright here you have a board game where you still get the competitive edge as board games go where you get to battle your opponent, but you also have a cooperative game because only one of your fellow players goes evil.  It is the best of both worlds.

As your players explore the house you find all kinds of events and items.  Each time you walk through a new doorway you add a tile from the stack so you get to build a new house each time you play.    One type of item is called an omen.  When an omen is found you roll the dice to see if the haunt starts.  If you roll under the number of omens found the haunt begins and one of your fellow players is now a bad guy.

The rules tell you what happens here and you each get a story of what has happened.  The first edition of the game comes with 40 different scenarios so it is highly likely that you will ever get the same game twice.  I have played the same scenario 4 times and between the players involved, the layout of the house and the items each player had each time it was vastly different.

The betrayer – or bad guy – gets his/her own set of story and rules as well as his/her own win condition.  The survivors or other players get their own story, rules and win condition.  Play starts after the Haunt with the player to the left of the betrayer so that all players get a turn to react to what bad thing has happened before the bad guy does.

You have the basement ground floor and 2nd story to explore and run around in and stories that can contain, vampires, dragons, zombies or animated plants as well as a hoard of other things.

With a vast array of new ways to play along with the second edition containing many fixes of some of the rules oops, like the underground lake being listed as a second story, and up to 50 scenarios, You can absolutely play this board game over and over again without ever seeing the same game twice.

So there you have it Betrayal at House on the Hill board game give it a try and let me know what you think.

Until next time stay nerdy my friends.

Nerdarchist Ted

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