Analyzing: Betrayal at House on the Hill

Introduction:

So, time again for another blog post. The second one for the Game Design: Analysis course. This week me and my group have been playing Betrayal at House on the Hill.

The Game:

This game is all about exploring a house with your friends. You can play as one of 3-6 players which must walk through a haunted house to find different items and rooms to defeat a traitor in their midst. In the beginning of the game, none of the players know who the traitor is, not even the person that will betray the rest. This is due to the fact that the game has two stages and the traitor is only revealed in the second round.

This game is using dices, but not the regular kind, it used normal 6 sided dices with most sides blank. You could only get one or two.

Every player has a card which displays their stats. There are four different stats that every player has: strength, speed, sanity and knowledge. Every character starts with a set number of points, varying from character to character. There are those who are very athletic and have high numbers in speed and strength, but not so much sanity and knowledge. Then there is the opposite: low speed and strength with high sanity and knowledge. There is also one or two hybrids, which have decent everything.

The speed stat is used for determining how fast you can move through the house, you get to move through one extra room for each point you have in speed. It is also used for some room based events, like for example to exit one room you need a certain amount of speed or you’d lose one point in strength.

The strength stat is mainly used to make physical attacks, either with a player or a monster as the target. When you do an attack against something, you get to roll one dice for every point you have in strength. Then the thing you attacked gets to roll one dice for every point they had in strength. The higher of the two numbers minus the lower value would be the damage. This means that if you were to attack something that was much stronger than you, or if you were really unlucky with the dices, you could take damage instead of the enemy. The person losing the fight would then decrease his/her speed and/or strength equally much as the number they got from decreasing the winning roll with the losing. The strength stat was also used for certain rolls in some of the rooms in the house.

The sanity and knowledge was mostly used for rolling for different things in the game, like open locked doors and such. There is certain conditions in the game that will let you use sanity or knowledge instead of strength to make an attack. This is called a mental attack and unlike a physical attack it targets sanity and knowledge.

The first half of the game is about exploring the house, finding new rooms with things in them. The house had 3 floors: ground floor, upper floor and basement. As you were exploring the house further you picked a tile from a pile, where they laid facedown. The back of the tiles showed if they were supposed to be in the basement, ground floor, upper floor or a combination of two or all of them. When you moved through a door into a not yet explored room you picked a tile from the pile that were for the same floor you were on and placed it next to the room you came from. You then proceeded to do what the tile said, if anything. The things that you had to do when entering a room for the first time were mostly draw a card. There were also certain rooms which required you to roll a dice when leaving, to prevent loss of stat before continuing.

There were three different kinds of cards present in the game: omen, event and item cards. What was on the different cards varied heavily from card to card, but it could be something like: You saw a ghost, make a sanity roll (if it was an event or omen card). And then different things might happen depending on what you got. Every time someone picked up an omen card, he or she had to make a dice roll with six dices. The number that the person got had to be equal or greater than the total number of omen cards in play at that time. If it was less it would trigger the second half of the game, the Haunting Phase.

When the haunting phase begun, the person responsible for triggering it would take up a secondary rulebook and check who became the traitor and what he or she did to become treacherous. This was dependent on what card was picked up to trigger the event and where it was picked up. This made it possible to get over 40 different second phases, ensuring that the game wouldn’t be played the same way twice. When the traitor and event had been figured out, the person that became the traitor got the traitors handbook, telling him or her what to do to be able to win the game and how to do it. For example there was one Haunt where the traitor became a gigantic two headed worm that were supposed to move around (which caused it to grow bigger), leaving body tokens after it. If the traitor got sixteen tokens onto the board before the players could kill it, he or she won.

The players on the other hand had to do a ritual, involving a skull and a knowledge roll to get rid of the worms damage immunity before they could try to kill it’s two heads. Each head had its own protection, movement and health. They did however share the same attack value.

Some of the Haunts didn’t have a traitor and then it was more every man for himself than a team effort. Others had a hidden traitor.

At the same time that the traitor got his or her rulebook, the rest of the players also got a rulebook. In this was the information necessary to defeat the traitor. They then had to talk everything through and try to come up with a tactic to try to win.

Round one:

The first round went slightly slow, since we were learning the rules but it didn’t take too long time to figure out the basics of the game. We mostly just ran around aimlessly, focusing on exploring as much as possible. When the haunt were later revealed, we got the World Destroyer Worm haunt which I described previously. After the haunt was revealed the game ended fairly quickly due to the fact that the player that had the item required to break the invulnerability of the worm was the person that became the traitor. So all that we had to do was to get to where the traitor began and then go to one of its heads. This was also fairly easy due to the fact that one player stood in a room which had a secret passage to the room next to the worm spawn.

Second round:

The second round began pretty much the same way as the first one did, but we got another Haunt, namely Frankenstein’s Monster. In this haunt the traitor kept his or her original character as well as gaining the control over Frankenstein’s monster. The monster could not be killed by normal attacks but had to be either pushed from a high part of the house or attacked 12 times by fire. The latter was done by throwing torches on it, which required a speed roll. You could get the torches in certain rooms in the house that had a fire in them. About half way through the second round we managed to kill the traitors original character, which meant that we only had to focus on the monster. We had, however miscalculated how things would be played out during the game and the monster cornered us one and one until only one of us were left. This was quite troublesome, since the character were a small boy which didn’t have much chance against the monster and was quite quickly killed.

Core Mechanics:

The two things that was consistent through the game were moving and attacking. You moved to explore, gather and other stuff while you attacked the enemy to destroy it (like many other games).

Good things:

The thing that I consider to be the best thing about its design is the high replayability. Since you randomize the entire house by moving around, no round is like the other. Where it previously were a kitchen, there could be a hallway the second time you played the game. Another thing that greatly increases the replayability is the haunt system, which also utilizes randomization to generate new experiences each playthrough. The fact that the second phase is also triggered randomly each time is also a thing that increases the replayability.

Bad stuff:

The thing that isn’t a very wise design choice when it comes to this game is the fact that the different characters have different starting stats and they gain and lose stats differently. This could have been done a lot better, as it is right now it is not properly balanced. If you were to pick a certain character you would almost have the game in your hand from the beginning.

The second thing that I found about the game that wasn’t very cleaver is snowballing. The fact that you gained more stats when you had more made the game slightly dull after a while. It also worked in the opposite way, decreasing your stats the lower they were. This only applied to certain rooms and events though.

Target Audience:

I don’t completely agree with the suggested age of this game (12+), mostly due to the fact that it’s a quite simple game. I would instead say that 8+ would be a more appropriate age.

Outro:

Congratulations for making it to the bottom of this huge wall of texts. I feel slightly sorry for you, but i hope that it was atleast somewhat interesting to read.