Can You Survive a Night at the House on the Hill?

I buy many games a year. Some I play often, some I play once, and some I have never opened. Betrayal at the House on the Hill holds a special place because it is such a great game for Halloween. It has become a tradition in our home to play the game at our Halloween parties, but the game is fun enough to played any day of the year.

Betrayal takes place in a haunted house, and each player assumes the role of a stereotypical horror movie character. The house is randomized every time you play, and you reveal rooms as you progress through the corridors. The first part of the game is meant to gather items and grow stronger (and avoid getting weaker!), but once an Omen card is revealed the Haunt may start. When the haunt begins, one player is revealed as the traitor and must leave the room for a few moments to study his diabolical plot.

In one of my favorite haunts, a witch had turned the heroes into mice. Their only escape from the house was to fly a toy airplane out of the attic window.  They were pursued by her cat while they tried to find batteries.  In another game, they had to survive until morning to collect an inheritance, but the traitor wanted the heroes dead so he would not have to share any of the money. There are a wide variety of haunts that cover the whole spectrum of horror. With fifty possible haunts and a randomly explored house, the game is never the same twice.

Sometimes the haunt can seem unfair or unbalanced, but winning and losing is not the point. Betrayal has light roleplaying elements, and exploring the house and revealing the haunt tells a shared story. As you explore the house you will meet creepy ghost children, receive telephone calls from your future self, and walk through doors that bring you to the other side of the mansion. The random situations make the game fun in the same way as Z-Man’s Tales of the Arabian Nights, for example.

Betrayal at House on the Hill was published after Hasbro bought Avalon Hill, and put it under the Wizards of the Coast banner. It was released along with Monsters Menace America, Sword & Skull, Nexus Ops, and Vegas Showdown. All of these games have been discontinued, and Avalon Hill only lives on through the several Axis and Allies games still in production. Since its discontinuation, Betrayal has gained a reputation in the gaming community, for good and ill. Many people love it because it is dripping in theme, but people also dislike its sloppy rulebook. The game is notorious for errors like an underground lake in the attic of the haunted mansion. Despite its flaws, it is still great to play.

Because of its reputation and rarity, it is an expensive game to acquire. It is currently averaging around $75-100 through the secondary market, and I have even seen copies go for $300. I would recommend getting a copy if you find it for less than $100. The game has fantastic replay value, and the components are worth it too. I think I spent $50 on my copy, and that is a steal for this game.

Betrayal at the House on the Hill is in desperate need of a reprint. The game is just too awesome to be kept away from the world. If Wizards receives enough feedback about it, they could be motivated to publish it again. I tried to email them myself, but the email form on their customer support website wouldn’t work for me on three different browsers. Fortunately you can still reach them by phone or snail mail.

There are some Facebook pages claiming to be dedicated to reprinting the game, but they seem to be focused on tips of where to buy the game and sharing homebrew material. There is a strong community for this game that creates new haunts and variants. One interesting variant has printouts for turning the character cards into the gang from Scooby-Doo and I think you could make some great Buffy the Vampire Slayer mods as well. An official expansion is out of the question, and until a new edition, we are left to our own devices.

Betrayal is one of my favorite games, and I recommend that everyone track down a copy. Better yet, flood Wizards of the Coast with requests for a reprint. They might even listen. Thankfully, many games have been released since Betrayal that contain themes of distrust and exploration, though none are so appropriate with a good Vincent Price film. Happy Halloween!

======================================================================================

Check out this Facebook page for tips on where to pick up the game and some links to new haunts. You can find plenty of great resources the Geek.

You can call Wizards of the Coast at 425-226-6500. You can also send them physical correspondence to:

Wizards of the Coast LLC
PO Box 707
Renton, WA 98057

They could be emailed from their help page, but good luck getting it to work.

And Beyond.

A wonderful thing about board games is that opinion can easily change with multiple plays. If you like a game your first time playing, a second game a few months later might be terrible.  The mood you’re in, the people you play with, or learning a rule you missed the first time can all alter your initial perception of a game. I had this experience with Ad Astra, and I want to offer a follow up to my previous review.

FFG's PR Team

I played Ad Astra again, this time with a full group of five players. This doesn’t drastically change the game like it would in something like A Game of Thrones, but it did feel like a substantial difference. Three people had played before, and the other two picked it up very quickly. This meant that a lot more strategy was happening from the start. Where the programming cards felt messy to me at first, the five player game limits how many you are able to play in a round.  Since everybody can use other players actions, this creates a bit of the mind game that I thought was missing.

While Laget may have compared the starships to Catan’s roads, I think they are more than that.  Commanding your fleet feels more like sending out explorers or ships full of colonists waiting to build a new settlement.  Once their job is complete, they are free to move wherever they have the fuel to go.  This adds to the feel of guiding the remnants of humanity to a new home more than just using them as a bridge between planets.

The game in action.

I stand by my opinion that the game is derivative of other games, but the game gains an identity once all the aspects gel.  As I mentioned previously, the scoring is a unique part of the game.  It’s the best part of the game too.  Having three cards with six options can lead to some great combos.  The flexibility is a blast, and knowing when to play which scoring action is an important part of the strategy.  Building terraformers is the strongest way to victory, but I managed to halt an opponents victory when one of my ships landed in another star system so that I could score big on the system influence scoring phase.  Our five player game actually ended with one person’s final scoring action being the arbitrator of whether one of two other players would be the victor.  He chose to abstain from the choice, and the game ended as a tie.

I’ll take a moment to mention that all the components are of good quality. There are four pawns that represent colonies, factories, terraformers, and starships, and these are unique designs made of plastic. the planets are thick card board, and they are really fun to place around the table. The game lacks a board (excluding the scoring/action card track), but the empty table space between solar systems counts as the deep space portions of the field. The character designs are fun, and they add some incentive to want to play a particular race.  The races are mostly inconsequential to play, but the combinations of planets and resources on the action cards vary for each species to add some strategy to their selection.

I admit, I was hasty to review Ad Astra the first time.  I was unable to see into its unique strategies and mechanics in my first few games.  It seems silly to have a second opinion from the same reviewer, but it can happen sometimes.  Five years ago I could have told you Risk was the greatest game ever made, but I would not be so kind now.  I liked Ad Astra my first few times playing it, but this last game blew me away with how much fun it was.  It is fast to play, quick to set up, and well balanced.  I think some of my fellow players find the terraformers overpowered, but I think the system is flexible enough.  Please do yourself a favor, and check out SPACE CATAN!

Sorry, I did it again!

To the Stars…

[UPDATE: If you want to know what I think about the game after a few more plays, check out my follow-up review. ]

Ad Astra is the first of Nexus Games’ Nexus Designer Series, published in North America by Fantasy Flight. The Designer Series shines a light on specific designers; for this first entry they chose Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget, the authors of Mystery of the Abbey. This is an interesting project, but I believe it falls short. The manual offers a cool history of the creators and their previous games, but that is all that distinguishes this game from anything else they might have done. As for the game itself, it may not be the best showcase for their talents.

The game is great, but it is a clear mash-up of Settlers of Catan (randomly placed resources to gather) and Race for the Galaxy (programmed action cards). Ad Astra is unique enough to not be “Settlers – IN SPACE,” but the mechanics seem cherrypicked more than “designed.” If this was to showcase their talents then I think they should have come up with more on their own. This almost feels like Nexus Designer Series: Teuber/Lehmann’s Ad Astra.

That being said, the random placement of planets, which represent the resources, and the programming of action cards work well within the game’s universe. The actions include exploring planets, harvesting resources, and constructing colonies. When you enter a solar system with a ship, you can flip all of the planets over secretly, and then you choose one to land on. Thanks to the scoring actions, you can vary your strategy throughout the game. For example, you can choose to score for the size of your fleet, or you may choose to score by your influence in systems.

I need to play through the game a few more times, but the scoring may be the biggest flaw in the game. While I like the principle of the system, in practice there may be a run away leader. In a three-man game, Jeff scored big several times by being the only player with terraformers, but he would still earn enough points to stay ahead if we tried to score on anything else. What propels someone in his position so far ahead is that the player who earns the most on the scoring phase receives a three-point bonus. I hesitate writing it off, however, because I suspect it could just as easily fling someone ahead in an opposite scenario.

While I may not have been impressed with the marketing of Ad Astra, this still remains a strong recommendation. At first glance, it is easy to make comparisons to other games. Even Serge Laget compared it to Catan several times in an interview, but the game is distinguished by what it doesn’t borrow from its influences. The importance of luck is diminished, and there is no correlation to that damned robber. On its own merits, the scoring is unique, and the exploration is fun. Ad Astra is a good start, but I hope the philosophy of the designer series improves in the following releases. I’d hate to see a Zooloretto/Blokus mash-up.

Actually, that sounds pretty rad. Nexus Games, get Knizia and Selinker working on that.

==========================================================================

Here is a neat list on BGG where Bruno Faidutti mentions all the influences to Ad Astra. It is interesting to hear him speak so candidly, and I do feel more was “borrowed” than stolen. He also says RftG is not an influence, and that Puerto Rico inspired the action cards. I’ll believe him, and back up my comparison as an opinion based upon never playing PR.

Middle-Earth Quest Update

Several months ago I made a boring, cop-out post with news about Middle-Earth Quest’s announcement.  The game is available now, but I don’t think anyone jumped on a written review.  We did, however, record a podcast review with Myriad Games that I think is totally worth checking out for Jeffery Norman Bourbeau’s (JNB) musical number.

Where there’s a whip there’s a way.

FFG Announcement: Runewars

Fantasy Flight Games has built quite the stable of games in the past few years, but even they had humble beginnings. One of their first games was Battlemist, and FFG announced yesterday that they will be revisiting their past.

Battlemist is being rebranded as Runewars, and it is being redeveloped by Corey Konieczka (Battlestar Galactica). This serves two purposes: They will distinguish the game from Battlelore, but they are also fitting the game into the Runebound universe.

I’ve never played Battlemist (it was before my time, gaming wise), but I love the idea of bringing more games into the Runebound universe. At this point, I may even be willing to read a comic or book set in that realm. Its good to see a company that makes so many licensed products developing such a strong IP.

The game will be another release in their “big box” line, and is billed as a game of fantasy empire building and conquest. From the photos available at the games website it looks to have an interesting board design.

No word on a release date, but we will keep you updated.

Check out the game’s (bare bones for now) website, and a cool essay by Christian Peterson about the game’s history.