In Betrayal at House on the Hill, 3 to 6 players take on the roles of a variety of victims as they explore a haunted mansion. Each victim has four stats: might, speed, knowledge, sanity. All of these scores get tested (and sapped away) as you explore, so no one character is really better than any of the others, it’s all just a mater of theme and taste.

After you choose your character the game easily divides into two parts.

The first, exploration, sees the players wandering through the rooms of a vast mansion. The mansion you explore is built as you move from room to room, with each new door you open requiring you to draw a new room card from the deck and place it before your character. Rooms get divided into three floors, the first floor, the second, and the basement. When you enter most new rooms you draw an event cart, which usually means some spooky event happens (like you find a talking skull or a mysterious phone call) and calls for a die roll to determine what effect the event has on your character. Other rooms, though, have a spooky raven symbol and mean that you draw a card not from the event deck, but from the omen deck. The omen deck gives you a powerful relic, but has a chance of activating a haunt and starting the game’s second phase. The more omens that occur, the higher the chance of the haunt’s happening.

Eventually, someone’s going to set off the haunt. What happens then is the person who drew the omen cross references the omen card he just drew with the room he drew it in. That combinations relates to a vast variety of haunts, all fully detailed in the game’s Book of Secrets. The game changes radically then, as the person who started the haunt—usually—gains control of some malicious force in the house and tries to kill the other players. With dozens of omen combinations and haunts, this sinister turn could take the form of the player becoming a slasher, gaining control over Lovecraftian horrors, an invasion of giant spiders, snakes, evil vines, Dracula, lots of stuff. At the same time, the other players gain information on how to escape or defeat the haunt. The game continues until either the “betrayer” bumps off all his friends, or visa versa.

See! Wholesome family fun!

Betrayal at House on the Hill gets a ton of points for cleverness, theme, and replayability. After breaking open the box a dozen of times I’ve never seen the same haunt twice. The game draws upon the best of low-budget horror, American slashers, and Hammer Horror and can have a very different feel between different haunts, as either you try to escape, search for a weapon to defeat the betrayer, or try to get a muguffin to a certain place in the house. All the time be harried by the creature of the week from Vincent Price’s Vault of Terror.

Betrayal’s been out for a few years now, and even though it has a ton of replayability I’d love to see an expansion. A few dozen new rooms, a new book of secrets, and new omens—maybe with a cool Lovecraft, Hammer, or other genre horror schtick—would be super cool. You can also try an online demo on the main Avalon Hill site.

A great game for lots of people, and a therapeutic way to get through the holidays. Thanks for the sweater Mom, now get in Mr. Anaconda’s belly!