Product Description

From Avalon Hill comes a new twist on terror! Each player chooses one of 12 mysterious characters to explore a creepy house filled with deadly secrets. As you play, you'll build the house, and explore new rooms. When you enter a new room, you might find something, or something might find you! When an explorer triggers a haunt, one of the players will betray everyone else. That explorer becomes the traitor who will try to defeat all his former companions. The rest of the players are heroes who must struggle to survive. From that point on, the goal of each player is to complete your side's victory condition first, either as the traitor or the hero. The game has 50 different haunt scenarios, and the house you build is different every time you play. It's a spooky strategy game that puts you face to face with legendary monsters, modern nightmares, and... your friends. Game comes with Secrets of Survival and Traitor's Tome Haunt Books, 45 Room Tiles, 6 Plastic Figures, 6 Double-Sided Character Cards, 80 Game Cards (Omen, Item, and Event Cards), 291 Tokens, 30 Plastic Chips, 8 Dice, a Turn/Damage Track, and Rulebook. For 3 - 6 Players, Ages 10 and Up.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61147 in Toys & Games
• Brand: Avalon Hill
• Model: 176070
• Dimensions: 3.39" h x 10.55" w x 10.63" l, .2 pounds

Customer Reviews

Great game, but download the errata!
This is a fantastic game that, as advertised, doesn't play the same way twice. Each game starts the same--you play the part of an explorer in a spooky old house. Each unexplored door reveals a new room (a tile that you turn over from the stack), many of which have items or events to discover. The twist comes once enough "Omens" (special items) have been collected--at that point one of the game's 50 scenarios comes into play, determined by which Omen was the last uncovered, what characters are playing, etc. One of the players now becomes the Traitor, and reads from a special book, while the rest, now called Heroes, read from their own book. The Traitor tries to bring some event to pass, while the Heroes try to stop him or her. It's fun being Traitor or Hero, and the way the game is set up it's usually someone different every time, adding even more replay value.

The game's complexity and violent content make it unsuitable for little kids, but it's a blast for adults! There are a few rule inconsistencies, which keep this game from getting 5 stars--however, there's now an errata you can download from the publisher's site that helps fix most of these errors. The pros definitely outweigh the cons on this one--pick it up and give it a try!

A must for fans of strategy games and horror stories
Betrayal at House on the Hill is great fun for fans of classic horror stories. You'll battle Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, carnivorous plants, cannibals, werewolves, zombies, mummies and even people you thought were your friends!

Fun - Five Stars

Betrayal is more strategy than role-playing, but it includes elements of both. Each player chooses a character with different traits needed to survive: might, speed, sanity, and knowledge. Based on what the characters encounter and how they deal with it, these traits can improve or degrade.

The most fun part is exploring. As in a good horror story, this is when the tension builds and the real fun happens. The room tiles are eerily detailed, and each has something different in it. Some are helpful, and some are very, very harmful.

The haunt is revealed when a player makes a hount roll and the result is less than the number of Omen Cards in play. This can sometimes happen way too soon, so my friends and I decided not to attempt haunt rolls until ten rooms have been explored.

When the haunt begins, one player turns traitor and leaves the room to read "The Traitor's Tome," which explain how the traitor wins, e.g. "when all of the heroes are dead," "you blow up the house," "you open the gate to hell." The heroes then read "Secrets of Survival" and discuss their strategy.

The cooperative element is interesting, but can be difficult for highly competitive players to grasp. These do better as the traitor who, with his monstrous minions, is alone against the rest.

Close battles are a lot of fun, but sometimes the variables weight a game in favor of one side. Once as the Zombie Lord, I killed all players but one, who picked up all the dropped items and became almost invincible. The battle was epic, but the undead didn't stand a chance. Also, if Frankenstein's monster goes after a physically weak character such as Professor Longfellow, it's a no-brainer.

Educational Value - Four Stars

While no substitute for reading Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, the game can generate interest in the classic stroies. It also has a strong cooperative element and requires critical thinking and self sacrifice.

Durability - Three Stars

Due to the incredible amount of tokens, some are bound to get lost. Also, the paint rubs off of the character cards from sliding the plastic trait markers up and down.

Overall - Five Stars

This game is very engaging and fun. Observe the recommended age of ten or above (the cannibal scenario is particularly disturbing), but ignore the 1 hour play time. Close games can take several hours, while some are over in half an hour.

Amazing
Every time you play this game, your appreciation for it will grow. It really is fascinating to see how the game shapes up as different rooms and events are combined: many times an event won't seem that bad in the room you draw it in, but in a later game, it will show up elsewhere and you realize how devastating it can be! I feel like everytime I play this game, I'm actually just playing a single round of a larger metagame, getting one more clue as to what the grand picture looks like. Even the components of the game have secrets that unfold as you play: it took me awhile to notice that all the monster tokens were color coded: orange for natural monsters like wolves and spiders, red for human monsters like cultists and freaks, green for undead such as zombies and vampires and blue for otherworldly creatures such as aliens and demons.

Besides the fact that the game can still surprise you after dozens of sessions, it has two other major strengths:

1) Great flavor. Between the events, items, omens and haunts, just about every horror genre/idea/villain is covered (and some from fantasy and science fiction as well). Yet, though it has something for everyone, the game still feels coherent. The overall tone is that of a classic haunted house movie, so its creepy, but not, for the most part, so gruesome as to detract from the fun of the game for people with delicate sensibilities (of course, gore fiends will still find walls running with blood, cannibal freaks and killers that just won't stay down). I've always been a fan of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink style games, that take all the icons of a genre and mix them together, but most games like that tend to be medieval fantasy oriented (Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, Heroes of Might and Magic, etc., etc., etc.). It's great to finally have an excellent catch-all horror game like this.

2) A good mix of strategy and chance. I've never felt like my brain could go to sleep while I play, yet its not so intensely competitive that the average player will get their ego wrapped up in winning. Again, the more you play, the more strategy you see.

MILD SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH: A word on the fifty different haunt scenarios: some of them are fairly straight forward, but some of them do really crazy things to the house, like flooding it, or having it slowly collapse into Hell, or have very unique foes, such as a blob that grows as it eats the house, leaving pieces of itself in each room it passes through.

The first time I played this game, I thought it was decent. The fifth time I played it, I realized it was my new favorite game. The fiftieth time I played it, I could hardly wait for the fifty-first. I've long been a fan of open-ended games, like Magic, that always feel fresh. I can honestly say that I think more experiences await me in this one little box than in the thousands of magic cards I have gathering dust in a closet.

(...and if the references to Magic and D&D are turning you off, let me assure you that my non-"gamer" friends love this game as well.)