Your next party game is a board game!

I have a great game for you and your friends if you fall into one of the following situations.

1. You and your friends love to play games, and you can meet up in person, but you have run out of fun games to play.
2. You and your IRL friends want to get into D&D, but it seems too daunting, so you want to start smaller.

Well, your next go-to game might just be a board game.

What is The Game?

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a 3 to 6 person board game where you search an abandoned house. There are six pre-made characters that you will choose from to get your stats. As you and your friends explore this house, you get to build it. Your selected character will have their own amount of spaces they can move, and this will have you picking up tiles to add onto each floor of the house (you start out on the ground floor, and you can find the basement, or the upper floor).

Why Would I Play This?

If you like the idea of playing something like Dungeons and Dragons but don’t want to go to the trouble of crafting an original character and trust someone in your group to make sure that a storyline is ready to go, this game is perfect for you.

All of the pre-made characters have a unique set of stat distributions and this will determine how you can play the game. Speed is the main stat that matters in the beginning this is how far you can move per turn. The other stats will come into play with events or after the haunting begins.

How does the gameplay? You will start in the foyer and each character will add on rooms as they take their turns. You and your friends will build up the main level, upper level, and basement by adding on rooms from a randomly sorted stack. Each tile can either have nothing happen or have prints that will cause one of three things to happen. If an event happens, you might have to roll dice to avoid a negative thing, or maybe roll to gain a positive thing. You could simply gain an item that can be used later. Or you could be dealt an omen, and you will have to roll dice to keep the haunting from happening.

You will want to try and explore the house as much as you can before the haunting inevitably starts. Once the haunting starts, one of the players will become the villain and will move away from the rest of the group. Each group will read from a book that will set the scenario in which you have to meet a win condition while trying to stay alive. All while the monster is trying to meet their win condition. Neither of the teams will know the other’s scenario so you must be careful not to fall into a trap.

Is it really that good?

Yes. This game is amazing because you will never play the same game twice. You will have games where everyone gets bad rolls, no items, and hits all the omen cards to start the haunting early and lose. Other times, you will get amazing rolls and have a ton of items and good events and be set for when the haunting happens. There are 50 different scenarios in the booklet that come with the standard version of the game, which means that you will have many different playthroughs.

In the end, this game is fun for anyone who wants to jump into a thrilling game that could take a turn for the worse at any moment.