Betrayal at House on the Hill
A Rollplaying, err, Roleplaying Game, but without
the Roleplaying. Or the game.
Does anyone else find this title rather awkward?
Shouldn't it be
"the
House on the Hill" or
something?
Regardless, what we have
here is, in style, essentially an extremely light roleplaying game. Each player
gets a "character" who is rated in two physical and two mental attributes -
Speed, Strength, Sanity, and Knowledge. You then wander around a
randomly-constructed house, making ability checks (which are done by rolling a
number of d3s equal to your rating in that ability against a target number), and
gathering stuff, Talisman-style.
At
some point then one player is revealed to be a traitor. He or she then faces off
against the remainder of the players, with both sides reading separate entries
corresponding to a randomly-generated scenario and are given distinct victory
conditions. First to succeed at their appointed task wins. This is unlikely to
be the traitor.
For those of you who
were playing AD&D circa 1980, you may remember that in Appendix A of the
Dungeon Master's Guide (© 1979), page 169, there was a scheme for randomly
generating dungeons that you could "play" solitaire. This reminds me of that,
albeit with the "betrayal" twist. Admittedly, if you've got more than 3 players,
the Traitor is likely to be creamed unless he's very
lucky.
This kind of game (one versus
many) can be done, and has been done well in the past - Lord of the Rings:
Sauron, for one, or Scotland Yard. I think what kills this game is just the
probabilities. The amount of fun you are going to have is directly proportional
to the number of decent or interesting "keeper" cards you draw throughout the
game; you get these randomly for exploring the house. If you draw a few and they
are useful, you'll have some tactical and strategic options, and the game could
theoretically be minimally engaging. If you draw few or none, you'll be bored
silly, and if you turn out to be the traitor, you'll be roadkill. With more than
4 players, it's overwhelmingly likely someone (or two) will be in this position
(I pity the poor traitor facing down 4 or 5 other players). Even with 4, there
just aren't enough good cards distributed to make the game engaging for
everyone.
The other problem with the
game is that I have no real evidence that any of the scenarios were proofread,
never mind playtested. My impression is, it's kind of a crap shoot - maybe
you'll get a scenario that sounded good when the author wrote it; or maybe
you'll get one someone actually played once or
twice.
"But it's an ambiance game!", I
hear you cry. To which I say, bah. How can you really get into a game which is
so random? If you were playing a D&D dungeon crawl, and it became apparent
that the DM was just rolling up the dungeon as you go along from that
aforementioned solitaire D&D system, and it didn't matter if you went right
or left, wouldn't that kind of kill the game? Ambiance requires structure at
some level. This game doesn't have
any.
Now it should be said, I am
clearly not in the target market for this game. This is aimed squarely at people
who like Munchkin, a game to which it is a close relative, although it is
somewhat less tedious. I'm not clear if this is a target market that actually
thinks Munchkin is a great game, or if they prefer unchallenging games
(activities really), or if it's a segment that simply doesn't know any better -
the reasons for the popularity of Munchkin are ultimately elusive to me (I
certainly appreciate the humor, but that clearly only accounts for about 20
minutes of the play time of the first game). Anyway, I doubt there are too many
serious Munchkin fans amongst my readers, so Betrayal at House on the Hill is
probably one to avoid.
Postscript: I
see that the designer is Dr. Bruce Glassco. I remember reading recently (I think
it was in Against the Odds, actually) a bit complaining about game designers -
wargames designers in that case - who use the "Dr" honorific in their design
credits, even though their PhD is at best marginally relevant to the task of
designing games. This is, apparently, a no-no. I am sympathetic to this
complaint; Herr Knizia certainly is never credited as "Dr.". I don't know if
it's an issue in this particular case (maybe Glassco really does have a game
design PhD?), but one would have to say that the odds are pretty
low.
Posted: Sunday - October 03, 2004 at 06:17 PM