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I Would Have Gotten Away With It, Too, If Not For… Betrayal at Mystery Mansion!

I Would Have Gotten Away With It, Too, If Not For… Betrayal at Mystery Mansion!

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ScoobyDooBetrayalOriginally published in 2004, Betrayal at House on the Hill continues to be one of my favorite games. I have reviewed the original game before, but there’s a new variant that’s just been released, aimed at a younger audience. While I wouldn’t say it surpasses the previous iterations of Betrayal, it definitely has a lot to offer on its own merits, particularly if you’re looking to get young gamers into a game that has more layers of complexity.

In Betrayal at Mystery Mansion (Amazon), you are playing 3 to 5 members of the Mystery Incorporated gang from Scooby Doo!, searching through a seemingly-haunted mansion and the surrounding grounds. You can explore inside and outside of Mystery Mansion, and eventually stumble upon the big bad Monster, often along with an assortment of minions to carry out its nefarious plots. There are, as in the original game, a variety of monsters and scenarios that play out, but it’s definitely much more streamlined than in the original game.

One major difference from the original is that when the Haunt is triggered, players get to choose who will play the role of the Monster. One of the only ways that Betrayal at House on the Hill can go south, from what I’ve seen, is if the “wrong person” is randomly assigned as the Betrayer.  If you’re playing with a casual gamer, in particular, it is possible that they don’t really understand what they’re supposed to be doing when they read their portion of the Haunt scenario, or maybe they’re just not very strategic in how they utilize their powers and abilities. This variant approach gives you the option to make sure that the person in the role of the betrayer actually wants to be put in that position.

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Tabletop Terror: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

Tabletop Terror: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

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Betrayal at House on the HillI was the only gamer geek in my family growing up. We played Monopoly, Clue, Risk, and so on, the staple games of the twentieth-century American experience, brought to you by Milton-Bradley, but my mother wasn’t a fan. She and my grandmother both tended more toward word games like Scrabble and card games, particularly Rummy variants. I became an avid Solitaire player early on. And we had an Atari, of course, then a Nintendo. So I was a gamer from an early age, but not a board gamer.

From high school and through college, I pretty much abandoned board games in favor of roleplaying games. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd edition) at first, but eventually I became engrossed in the World of Darkness system from White Wolf Games (now published by Onyx Path Publishing).

Board games had completely fallen off my radar by the time I got out of college and began actively adulting. Board games, after all, were for kids, right? In the age of roleplaying games and video games, including an array of online roleplaying games, surely there was no way a board game could be nearly as engaging, nearly worth the time commitment to play it.

It was Betrayal at House on the Hill (Amazon) that dispelled that illusion, showing me what board gaming had become while I hadn’t been paying attention.

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