Each Friday I shine my big, bright spotlight on a game that deserves attention. This week, Avalon Hill’s “Betrayal at House on Hill” gets a warm moment in the sun.

Over the Christmas break, I had a chance to play Betrayal for the first time with a group of recently met friends. The premise of the game is simple, you are part of a group of people who are exploring a haunted house (the House on Hill part of the game), eventually someone in the party goes mad and tries to achieve some sort of diabolical objective which usually involves sacrificing one or more members of your party (hence, the Betrayal part of the game). The game visualizes this very well; instead of using a traditional game board (á la Clue), each room in the house is represented by a tile. Whenever you go into a new room, you lay down a new tile at random. This ensures that the gameplay stays fresh and adds an element of excitement to the process.

A doomed explorer ponders his fate.

The game starts of in this exploratory phase, where everyone more or less works together to explore the house. However, as more and more rooms are explored, more and more supernatural events happened. These happenings are represented in this case by a deck of supernatural events that you draw from as you enter certain rooms. Every-time one of these supernatural events occur you roll the find out if it is time for the betrayal to occur. As the game moves on it gets progressively easier for the betrayal to occur, eventually moving to the point where the Betrayal is forced to occur (otherwise Betrayal at House on Hill would be a bit of a misnomer). Once the Betrayal happens the game becomes really interesting. Using a matrix involving who tripped the betrayal, in what room they tripped it and what event caused the tripping, the betrayer gets an objective in secret (there are over ). While the betrayer studies their new objective, the betrayees find out what they have to do in order to survive. Neither side knows the other’s objectives. The game ends when either side completes their objective.

This was a fun game to play, setup was a breeze and we were all exploring the house in under five minutes. The included characters are colorful and the room tiles were really neat. The betrayal scenario was interesting and fairly balanced so that it wasn’t just one side overwhelming the other and thumbing through the book there seemed to be quite a variety of horror situations. The rules were sometimes unclear, but they released clarifications and errata online that fix most of the problems. Also, they had little punch-out counters for just about anything that could come up in the game. While it was cool that a statue was represented with a statue token, it sucked having to spend four or five minutes digging through the box to find it. Perhaps this would be less of a problem to someone who was more organized.

Overall “Betrayal at House on Hill” was a fun and interesting way to spend 90 minutes with friends; and for $40, it packs an incredible value.