Blog Post 2: Board Game Session Report

Our group played Betrayal at House on the Hill. The game has two phases; in the first phase, players explore a house by wandering into unknown rooms and drawing room tiles from a stack. Room tiles can hold Item, Event, or Omen cards. If a player draws an Omen card, they must make a Haunt Roll-- a roll of 6 dice. (Dice in this game only have 0, 1, or 2 points.) If the number rolled is greater or equal to all the omen cards drawn during this game, you're safe. But if it's lower, the game shifts into the second phase.

In the second phase, depending on what the omen card was and where it was drawn, the players now have to deal with one of the game's 50 scenarios. In this phase, one player is revealed to be the traitor (nobody knows who the traitor will be until the second phase, not even the traitor), and now has a secret objective to meet. The remaining players must also meet their own secret objective.

My character's stats. Each player has 4 stat categories that can raise or lower based on various events.

The first play. Speed determines how many tiles you can move in a turn. If a room makes you draw a card, though, your movement ends there.

• On my first turn, I wandered into the dining room. There I found a girl, who boosted my knowledge and sanity, and I then made a successful Haunt Roll.

• A turn or two later, I found myself in the graveyard. There I drew an oddly fitting funeral card, and soon I had visions of myself in the casket. Fortunately I saw through them (sanity roll), and ended up gaining 1 sanity as a result.

• At one point in the game, somebody finds a chapel room, which allows everyone to regain 1 sanity point per game. Since I have been the most sane person this whole game, I don't really need to go there. Everyone else, though, is dangerously low on sanity, and all rush there immediately.

• As time goes on I notice we've been extremely lucky this game. All of my encounters so far have used only sanity checks. Andre, who has the fastest character, has been hitting a lot of speed checks. Jerika has just been finding a lot of items. We’ve also been dodging a lot of haunt rolls. (I forget the exact number, but I believe we made it up to 7 omen cards before finally losing the roll.)

• I travel upstairs and find the Mystic Elevator, which is a sort of free-floating room that allows me to connect to any unexplored doorway. The destination floor is decided by a roll.

• I end up in the basement.

• Mind you, I'm actually pretty excited by this. There are no stairs into the basement, which means 2 things:

1. At this point in the game, there's no way in or out except for the Mystic Elevator. There's something cool about having my own secret space.
2. I can grab items without anyone bothering me. Not that they'd bother me anyway, I mean, we're all on the same team... right?

• It doesn't take long for the secret adventure to be cut short, though. Two rooms into the basement, I find a Mask. I make a Haunt Roll. I fail a Haunt Roll.

Shit.

• Because I found the Mask in the Catacombs, we are assigned scenario #25: Voodoo.
• Except Maaike just played that scenario not to long ago. Because of this, we decide to skip to the next page, #26: Pay the Piper.
• Devon is found to be the traitor. We send her out with the Traitor's Tome while we read our own Secrets of Survival
• A few minutes into reading the objective, I realize that we possibly just jumped to a scenario that assumes there are cards or rooms in play that actually aren't. Maiike double-checks the requirements and assures me it's fine. (We later learn that the rules actually include a proper method for choosing another scenario if there are repeats.)
• Everyone comes back and the second phase begins.
• Scenario 26 involves one person controlling twice as many rats as there are players. Because there's a bucketful of tokens, Maiike decides it easier to just grab the first 10 monster tokens instead of wasting time fishing for rats.

Ah yes, the tentacle rat.

• We start killing rats. They're pretty weak.
• About halfway into her rat stock, Devon realizes that she can, technically, use her Adrenaline Shot (which allows you to add 4 or so points to a roll) on her rats. 
• Andre goes in to a room to fight two rats at once. This is the most tense part of the second phase.
• Unfortunately, the adrenaline doesn't help. A lot of the dice end up blank.

• As we continue to massacre the rats, the traitor tries completing her objective, which is to find the pentagram room and perform a ritual in it. She explores as much of the ground floor as she can.
• Soon, however, all the ground tiles are dispensed--and the pentagram room is among none of them (which means it's either in the basement or the second floor).
• Not long after that, though, all the rats are disposed of, and the survivors successfully escape the creepy rat house.