At the start of this year I asked if this year would be the year of the portrait. Do you know what portraiture requires? Being near people. Unfortunately for me, and the rest of the world, Covid-19 rolled around and being around people is not a good look, so my experimentation with portraiture has been put on hiatus. NYC is opening up again, but a second wave of cases certainly isn’t out of the question so I’ve decided to wait it out until the virus is contained in some way.
With this time I’ve decided to do some writing about some of my other interests. It’s no secret that I’m a massive nerd. If you scroll far enough in my Instagram account (@sd_conrad) you will find lots of cell phone pictures of board games. On top of that, there’s a D20 in my logo that I use on business cards and on my website. I thought it might be fun to write about games that I enjoy or have inspired me in some way. I also work best with deadlines, so why not write about 1 game a day for 10 days? Without further ado, lets get started.
BETRAYAL AT HOUSE ON THE HILL
Avalon Hill - 2004
picture from BoardGameGeek.com
Back in 2012 or so I was in a funk. I hated my job, I wasn’t doing anything creative, I didn’t have any hobbies, I was just kinda coasting with no direction. In my search for something to sink my teeth into I discovered the YouTube series Tabletop, which had debuted earlier in the year. After watching a few episodes I thought board games might be something I could enjoy. A quick search revealed that my local game store, Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn, had a weekly board game night where they taught games. I recruited my buddy Joe Donnelly, who is always up for something new, and we were off. The game of the night happened to be Betrayal at House on the Hill.
The game had me hooked immediately, I had never seen anything like it. Most board games I knew were the type where you pull out a square piece of cardboard, unfold it, place your piece at the start, and you roll some dice to move. This couldn’t be any more different. You still pick your piece but each piece has unique properties, unlike a game like Monopoly where the piece you choose is arbitrary. In Betrayal, choosing your piece has consequences. There’s also no board, at least not your traditional board.
I should back up a bit because in order to understand the game’s mechanics you should know the theme of the game. Based on the name and the box art it should be easy to deduce that the game is a horror themed adventure. You and up to 5 other players take control of different characters who are drawn to this spooky house on the hill for one reason or another. Each character fits your classic horror story archetype - there’s the jock, the beauty, the young boy, the little girl, the old man, and the mystical woman. When you select your character you get a character card with your stats and a unique pawn. Additionally, each archetype has two sides with two different sets of stats. For instance, the jock can either be Darrin “Flash” Williams or Ox Bellows. One is super speedy, the other is super strong, neither have much in the way of intelligence. You can be Father Rhinehardt or Professor Longfellow, Rhinehardt having greater resistance to losing his mind and Professor Longfellow a greater set of general knowledge, but neither are physical specimens like Flash or Ox. These stats are important for the scenarios that happen later in the game, but you don’t know which stats will be important until it’s too late to do anything about it.
When our teacher was setting up the game the first thing I noticed was how the “board” is set up. Instead of the cardboard being unfolded and presented before us, a small strip of cardboard was placed on the table with the artwork of a large entryway for a mansion. This is where all the players start. There are a total of four doors along the hallway and a set of stairs going up to the second level, which is represented by square piece of cardboard set off to the side. We also know there’s a basement indicated with a separate piece also set to the side but we don’t know where those stairs are. On your turn you can move a set number of squares as indicated by your character’s “speed” attribute. So while Flash can dart around the mansion moving up to 6 squares as he sees fit, Father Rhinehardt ambles along moving only up to 3 squares. During your turn you may explore what’s on the other side of an unopened door. When you do, your movement ends and you pull a tile off the stack of room tiles and align the door symbols as best you can. This modular board means you will never see the same layout twice. This concept absolutely blew me away when I saw it.
At the start of the game there is no clear objective, you’re just exploring. Each room will have either an Event, an Item, or an Omen. Events can be good or bad, items can be good or bad, omens can be good or bad, it’s pure chaos from the start. The major caveat is if you draw an Omen card you must perform a die roll which might trigger the next phase of the game - The Haunt.
The Haunt is where the game turns itself upside down. There are 50 different potential haunts so you could play this game many times before seeing the same haunt twice. The Haunt reveals the objective of the game and sets win conditions for all the players. There are too many to go through and each are different enough to be exciting to experience for the first or even the second time.
Back in 2012, Joe and I were sitting in Twenty Sided Store, we’re both deep in to the role play aspect of the game. Joe was Ox and was doing his best 80s horror movie meat head. I was Zoe Ingstrom, an 8 year old girl obsessed with her dolly. We had 3 strangers playing with us who were equally in to their characters. Whenever we had to draw a card we did our best to make it as campy and ridiculous as possible. At the time we didn’t know a haunt was even going to happen. Our teacher hadn’t told us why we were rolling dice each time we pulled an Omen card and he told us to just do what our instincts said. Once the haunt began one of us was revealed to be the villain. This is where the game gets its name, one of you will betray the rest when the haunt begins.
Our teacher gave us the book about haunts and helped us figure out which haunt we were on and let us loose to figure out our win conditions. He then brought the betrayer outside with their OWN book to determine their own win conditions. Now we’ve got a game! Before this it was just madness, now we’re in it to win it.
I don’t remember the exact scenario we had but I have vivid memory of the end of the game. The betrayer had a Frankenstein’s Monster type of thing on their side that automatically attacked the closest target. We had these torches we could use to throw at the monster to slow it down and we knew in order to kill it we had to throw it off the ledge from 1 of 3 different ledges we knew about in the game. The monster had already killed a number of us and it was down to just me and Joe.
We lured the monster to a set of stairs that lead up to a balcony. I, knowing it could only do 1 move and 1 attack on its turn, sacrificed myself for the greater good and moved myself to the same room as the monster. On its turn the monster attacked me, killing me instantly, and made its way up to the balcony to attack Joe on its next turn. Joe, as Ox, had one shot to shove this horrible monster to its death. I swear the dice flew out of his hands in slow motion, all of us with our fingers crossed. The person playing the betrayer had no idea his monster was in peril when he went up there. He didn’t know our win condition was to push his monster from a great height, he didn’t even know it was an option. He sat there watching the dice as intently as the rest of us, stunned that he allowed this to happen. Ox is a strong guy and this is a strength roll so he was rolling all the dice available. I don’t remember what he needed to roll but I remember leaping out of my chair and yelling. He had done it. Joe raised both of his arms and shouted, the rest of our team high fiving, the betrayer laughing and clapping, and our teacher giggling to himself standing over us. The rest of the store had been pretty quiet up until that point but suddenly people were coming over asking what happened. We probably talked about the events of the game longer than it took for the game to play out. I still talk about that session to this day.
And that’s the point of the game. It’s not the best game I’ve ever played, it’s not even my favorite game. The game isn’t about who has the best strategy or who can outsmart the other players the best, it’s about the stories it generates. I’ll be honest, sometimes the random aspects sets up a scenario that just doesn’t work well. I’ve had a haunt end on the very first turn it starts because we happened to have everything we needed to win. That really sucks but that’s just how it goes sometimes, the game is far from perfect. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it’s fine just the way it is with all its flaws. If you and your friends are able to put yourselves in that house as those characters then each game will be fun regardless and more often than not you’ll end up with a great story you’ll remember for a long time.
Even after the rest of the store went back to their own thing, Joe and I talked with the other players about the game for a good while. Joe and I argued over who was going to buy it that night. Joe won. That night turned in to a cherished memory immediately and Betrayal at House on the Hill caused it. Even though it might produce the odd bad game every once in a while, it will always have a place on my shelf because of that one night in 2012.