Day 8 - Co-op Games Day

Today I got to play Betrayal at House on the Hill in which all the players are working together to discover a haunted house and uncover the betrayer among you. Once the betrayer is revealed so is the "haunt" and the players are given two separate instruction books, one for the team and one for the betrayer. It involves some dice rolling, mainly as checks for mental and physical stats. The really cool thing about this game is that the board is built as you uncover new tiles which are shuffled so you'll never play with the same board twice. There's also a ton of scenarios because there are many different ways to bring about the "haunt" and it can be any scenario from the house slowly sinking into Hell to a giant blob monster expanding through the house. Again, another feature that gives the game a lot of replay value in that having the same game twice is very hard. In my game we had to face an evil blob monster that expanded to each adjacent room every turn. It was extremely difficult and we lost, but it was a very close game.

In order to do well in this game you have to be very vocal with your team to create a good strategy, especially since each character has different strengths in certain stats. To defeat our monster we needed to pass a lot of knowledge checks, so we assigned the people with high knowledge stats on containing the monster while the player with high might concentrated on fighting the actual betrayer and the rest of the players continued to explore the house looking for items that might help the group. If even one person doesn't act as a team player it can cause everyone to lose to the betrayer. The only thing I didn't like was the aesthetics of the game. A lot of the tiles looked the same and the player tokens looked like something off an model train set. Other than that though I really enjoyed the game even though it took a long time to play.