Josh M
United States
Minneapolis
Minnesota
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After many years of looking hideous on various shelves, the dust was blown off of the cover of the first generation version of Betrayal at House on the Hill. An awkwardly verbose title that the three of us worked on learning this weekend.
I am new to this type of gaming and I learned a big lesson this weekend. Don't punch out all of the pieces until you need them. Later, looking for one token that says "cat" or "wall switch" can be a time suck. That said, we all dove in and figured out the game as we went along.
ACT I: Building the house
The play begins with our protagonists and our as yet to be known antagonist appearing suddenly in a long hallway of rooms. As in any horror movie, the first play one of us made was to split up. Based on rolls of the dice, we opened up new rooms and made the house into an architect's nightmare, kitchens were far away from any dining room, no bathrooms to speak of, just sheer badness. Maybe those were omens as well. The first round we played of this game had us collect 7 omen cards and 1 item card before the haunt started. The next had 8 omen cards and one player had 6 items (the vault had a safe too).
This part of the game was enjoyable but does require diplomacy as the rules and some statements seem ambiguous and to keep the game moving on, concessions and victories of small points need to be made. Repeated consultations to the rule book and the subsequent errata online made me wonder how much testing was done prior to release. I can see small issues happening in Act II, but in the first act it was a bad omen.
Luck was the fourth player in our group. An uninvited guest who made sure that its fingers were in all of our dealings. It picked out which room we would go into next, what roll our dice would get, and what items, if any, would come our way.
By the end of Act I, we had a large rambling house built. One room had two secret exits as well. Cards were placed to the side so we could remember special rules for that room and the game teetered almost on the side of too much information.
Act II: The Haunt
The haunt starts based on an unfortunate die roll. Each time a player pulls an omen card*, a haunt roll is done and when the low number comes up, the haunt is started based on the room and omen card. We played through haunts 35 and 30. Since spoilers could ruin the game to an extent, I won't go into too many details.
Let me review these a bit separately though. When haunt 35 began, the positioning in the house of the players were so that a win was so lopsided we wondered if we should play it through. The plus part was that the game seemed to be in synch with the protagonist and antagonist's rule book. There weren't any discrepencies. Haunt 30, well, at one point we almost wanted to read each other's book to verify the information. Some of it seemed to be missing.
In both playthroughs, the antagonist was left in the dust either by luck or by guess as the rules weren't as clear as they should be. Also, we also saw how the game could change time length to something much longer with more players.
ACT III: Denouement
The game ends with a paragraph in the book. The phrasing and cadence made me wonder if they had hired R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard from the Choose Your Own Adventure series to write it.
Ratings:
Components: The pieces seem to be good quality but there are too many unnecessary tokens that required wading through. Some of them needed but many could have been eliminated for an omnibus token or three.
Learning curve: Pretty short. We were able to push our way through a game the first time with none of us having played it before pretty well. There was a small part of the game we didn't notice we were playing wrong but it ended up not affecting game play.
Replayability: High. Enough adventures to keep the house building and rebuilding. The story is the key and interesting part for me.
Issues: The rules should have been more concise and direct instead of ambiguous or just incorrect.
Luck vs Strategy: The best strategy is to get as many items as possible before the haunt starts. This isn't easily accomplished due to luck rearing its ugly head in front of you blocking your vision.
Overall rating: 7.5. It's an oddly fun game for something that seems so sandbox free but is really running on a tight railway system. The game's first act sets up the scene, the second act happens and in both cases, it was over before we knew it. The third act is just a p.s. Unfortunately, the game is story based and having the arc so gruesomely unbalanced almost gets in the way. It could use a bit more beef, but I'm not sure what animal would help.
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tom moughan
United States
Rochester
New York
ahh....I love the smell of a stack of sketchily placed animals in the morning!
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yes, this game is not played for its strategic value but for the experience and story. After many years of gaming, I finally had a chance to play this game.
I will gleefully recall my first play of this for all of eternity: After 40 min of playing I turned to a friend, who was also playing the game for the first time, and said: "I don't know how to win." She looked at me and said, "ummm...neither do I." It was hilarious.
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William Roop
United States
Mendon
Michigan
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I got this game when it first came out (I won it at GenCon!) and bought a cheap 2nd copy when I found it going OOP so I wouldn't "lose" the game when the cards wore out from repeated play!
One of the parts of the game that my gaming groups have enjoyed MOST is that the traitor doesn't know the survivors' win condition and vice versa! I have played games where the traitor, following HIS win conditions, blundered into a perfectly laid trap (okay, we just HAPPENED to draw the item we needed before he wiped us out). This CAN lead to some head-scratching moments as you try to get information out of each other to see if what you did allows you to win or not. If you download the eratta to each book, you will have MUCH of this cleared up.
Go to the BGG page for Betrayal and there is a LOT of files and forum advice for this game. There is even a file telling you how to sort your tokens and chits into envelopes and which envelope gets used in what story!
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Jeffrey W
United States
La Grange
Illinois
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stpauler wrote: Issues: The rules should have been more concise and direct instead of ambiguous or just incorrect.
Oddly, this hasn't bothered me nearly as much as it probably should. The confusion & ambiguity somehow seem to fit with the general tone of the game and no one I play with tends to get too hung up over "winning" and "losing" the haunts--in fact, most of my favorite games have involved horrible defeat/bad luck/both on my part 
That said, good review.
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