HORROR MONTH #9: Betrayal at House on the Hill, by Bruce Glassco (2004)

Type of Media: Board Game

Can you trust your friends? When your bud invites you for a night out, are you sure he's not actually a crazed sorcerer, or a mad scientist, or even a merman leading you to your doom?

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a board game where these are all legitimate fears. When a game of Betrayal starts everyone's on the same team, helping each other look for items and worrying about each other's safety. But then you have a sudden revelation: one of your friends is not who they seem to be.

Betrayal takes place in two phases. In the first, you and your friends explore a massive creepy mansion together. Placing tiles that build the mansion as you go along, you search rooms while encountering paranormal phenomena and hopefully snagging helpful equipment or relics to boost your stats along the way.

Every time you encounter something scary during this exploration, you roll a growing handful of dice. Once you roll a high enough number, the game switches. It turns out one person in the party is a traitor, and this whole time they've been leading you through some kind of evil trap. This trap changes in nature depending on the variables of your particular playthrough, so one game the traitor could be a vampire lord trying to turn everyone into bloodsuckers, and the next the traitor could be an alien and the whole house was actually a UFO in disguise.

Every scenario has different mechanics and win conditions for the traitor and survivors, some of which it waits to spring on you until the last minute. This gives the traitor a bag of tricks they can throw at the survivors to buy time, and gives the survivors something to dread as they try to accomplish their objective, and those things change every time you play the game.

This is one of the coolest things about Betrayal. The base game includes 50 different scenarios to start, and optional expansion Widow's Walk adds 50 more, making almost every game a fresh experience in some way (unless you play sooo many games of Betrayal you have every scenario memorized, but that's a pretty unique problem to have). The level of randomness also makes the first phase of the game tense. Who's going to be the traitor? Where are the important rooms/items going to be? When will your friends stop rolling low and just trigger the damn betrayal already!?

Betrayal is a big, fun horror game. It isn't concerned about being deep or balanced as much as giving you a memorable story. In fact some of the scenarios are so unbalanced you wonder if it's even possible for a certain side to win them without tremendous amounts of luck. If fairness and depth are big concerns for you in your games, maybe sit this one out. If not, though, Betrayal at House on the Hill is such a unique curio you'll be gathering groups of friends together just to show it off.