Betrayal at House on the Hill is a game that puts you right in the middle of a haunted house full of all of the best horror trope.
Betrayal at House on the Hill is a horror-adventure board game that puts you and your friends right in a spooky haunted house. The doors and windows have all locked behind you, weird stuff is happening all around you, and at any moment someone will trigger the big-monster to come out of the woodwork and make terrible things happen. But the only way out is through…. Through this always-changing haunted house.
| Quick Guide | ||
|---|---|---|
| Mechanics | Semi-Cooperative, Map Building, Traitor | |
| Players | 3 – 6 Players, Age 12+ | |
| Playing Time | Varies Greatly, But 60 Minutes on Average | |
| Similar Games | Dead of Winter, Nemesis, Gloomhaven | |
| Publisher | Avalon Hill |
Betrayal at House on the Hill Overview
First coming out in 2004, Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game that takes all of your favorite horror movie tropes and crams them into one box. Monsters? Ghosts? Zombies? Every possible room you’d expect a haunted mansion to have, including a magic elevator? A traitor? Betrayal has it.
The game’s concept is that three-to-six adventurers of varied ages and skills break into an old creepy house. The doors lock behind them, and they must explore their way through the house. As players move their characters, they add rooms onto the house, effectively building the map as they go. So the house’s layout is random and never the same as any time before.
As players discover more and more rooms, they will get cards – sometimes items, sometimes events, and sometimes omens. But any omen may trigger the end-game as the main monster comes out to play. Often, this in turn triggers one of the members of the party to turn traitor and work with the incoming horror trope.
Players must use teamwork and strategy to complete their objective, defeat the monster, and escape the house before everyone has been eliminated.
How to Play Betrayal at House on the Hill
To begin a game, players must choose their character, take the corresponding token and stat tracker, and set each stat to their starting point. The stats are Speed and Might (physical) and Sanity and Knowledge (Mental), and character has different starting stats. Players will also lay out the house’s foyer, shuffle the various decks of cards, and the deck of room tiles.
Each turn, players may move their character a number of spaces or rooms equal to their speed at that time. For example, Ox starts with a base speed of 4, so he can move up to four rooms in any direction. But if he were to take physical damage and reduce his speed, he may only be able to move two or three spaces. For every new room they enter, players will draw a room tile from the top of the stack and place it where the next room will go.
Many rooms have markings in the corner signifying a card that the players must pull the first time they have entered the room. These cards may give you a special or helpful items, or may make you test your luck by rolling some dice and seeing if your character gains—or loses—any mental or physical health. but some rooms are marked with omen cards.
These are by and large the same, except that they have a chance of triggering the final haunt. Players will roll dice to determine if the haunt is about to begin, and when it does they will flip to the right page in the game book to see which randomly selected monster they are under attack from and work together to meet the haunt’s objective or succumb to the attacking monster.
Should I Buy This Game?
Betrayal is quite literally my favorite board game. If you’re at my house and a game is suggested, there is a very good chance I will say “Ooo, what about Betrayal?” And often, it gets played, because it’s fun. I love this game and I’ll always recommend it to people. But it does have a few drawbacks that some may find annoying.
Games may take an hour, like the box says. But games can also take much less if players are unlucky enough to have an early haunt and a mostly un-explored house and no collected items. Or they can also go on much much longer if everyone is lucky and smart. Some of the haunts are also scaled strangely. Some are very difficult while others are easy-peasy.
Still, even with those criticisms, the Betrayal has massive replayability, a great use of tension, is easy to learn and teach quickly, and is especially fun for competitive groups of friends who don’t mind (lovingly) turning on each other a a moment’s notice.
