Betrayal At House On The Hill is one of the first board games I ever loved. It is also one of the first I ever hated. Like so many modern board game neophytes, with maybe a game or two of Dominion and Catan under my belt, my first impression of Betrayal At House On the Hill was one of delight and wonder at its seemingly infinite possibilities. The idea that a game’s objectives and victory conditions could be different every time it was played was mind-blowing. My friends and I played it many times over the first year or so I owned it, alongside a steady diet of titles from an increasingly wide selection of other games I’d been acquiring at a somewhat embarrassing rate. We began noticing something odd. We enjoyed every other game we tried more than Betrayal, aside from the rare massive whiff (which will remain nameless until I review those as well). Fast-forward roughly six years, and oh how tastes change. To say that I now consider Betrayal At House On the Hill to be a bad game would be a massive understatement. It is abysmal. Awful in every regard. A masters class unto itself in how not to make a game. The illusion it had cast me under has long since faded away, and it is abundantly clear that the true nature of its sprawling, open-ended design stems not from ambition, vision, or cogency — but simple ineptitude.
When I dislike a game and am collecting my thoughts on it, I always spend a decent amount of time clarifying to myself the positive elements of its design or production. I tried for Betrayal. It didn’t work. It has none. For starters, the production is absolute trash. Thin, warp-prone cardboard, deformed miniatures that barely look human, stat-tracking clips that don’t stay in place, artless illustrations that are dreary and lifeless. Just awful. Though a game’s production tends to have very little influence over my final opinion of it, I find all of these things worth mentioning to further elucidate the game’s lack of any redeeming qualities. However to be completely fair, I purchased my copy of the game in 2013. There were rumblings of potential moisture issues in the publisher’s warehouse around that time, so I’m assuming the QA on more recent copies of the game has gotten better. If it hasn’t, that is truly shameful.
On the cover of Betrayal At House On The Hill, directly under the title and perfectly conspicuous, is a statement of authorship that bills this as a “strategy” game. This is an egregious lie. There is about as much strategy in this game as there is player agency in Candy Land. You spend the first 45 minutes or so of a game of Betrayal without an objective. A strategy game without an objective, huh? I really hope I don’t have to explain to you how contradictory that is. So what do you even do for the first half of Betrayal? You “explore” the house by drawing random room tiles, triggering random events, until one of the random events triggers a “Haunt” (also random). The “Haunt” is when the game actually begins, and typically splits the players into two camps (usually a single “Traitor” versus everyone else). Each side gets separate victory conditions. In order to facilitate this process, you must take a 15-20 minute break in the middle of the game to read the rules of the Haunt you are playing. 99% of the time — sometimes due to vague rules, sometimes a player’s poor reading comprehension, most often some combination of the two — there is a rules misunderstanding and the game barely functions. Even when both sides understand the Haunt and their winning conditions perfectly, the resulting contest between them is typically short, unfulfilling, and heavily lop-sided. When a game’s board layout, player locations, player equipment, player statistics, AND winning conditions are all largely determined randomly, every star in the galaxy would have to align to concoct an experience that’s even remotely interesting or worth playing. More than once, our game ended less than two rounds after the Haunt was revealed. Ridiculous.
Okay, so Betrayal At House On The Hill is complete garbage as a strategy game. Everyone knows that. People that love Betrayal know that. “But not every game has to be about strategy, my man! Sometimes it’s all about that theme, am I right?” To an extent, sure, but unfortunately Betrayal is complete garbage as a thematic game as well. Maybe even worse. Its narrative is literal nonsense. I played a game of Betrayal where we found a trap door leading back to the entrance in the first room we explored (very useful shortcut!). In that same game a player found a bunch of grave dirt in a cupboard and it scared him so badly he went insane (in the game because he failed a skill check, in real life because of how stupid what was happening was). Inexcusably lame incidents like that occur pretty much every turn. Absolutely nothing that happens is a natural extension of preceding events; it’s just one non sequitur after the next. There’s not even a provided explanation about what you’re doing in the house in the first place, but I suppose nothing would make any sense out of this malarkey anyways.
Exacerbating the sheer inanity of it all are the Haunts themselves. They’re not even worth talking about. They mostly devolve into bottom-of-the-barrel Ameritrash dice-chucking. The ones that don’t are even worse, tasking you with such goals as parachuting off the back of a giant bird (don’t ask). As for the combat, there’s nothing to say other than it sucks. A single bad roll can wipe you out of the game. Also, the text on the item cards is pure gobbledygook; some card descriptions contain entire paragraphs of information. As most players will have amassed a sizable hand of cards by the time the Haunt rolls around, that is another huge problem. So not only does Betrayal have zero strategy and zero theme, it’s also impossible to keep track of what’s going on. Again, ridiculous.
Despite the cover listing Bruce Glassco as the sole author, Board Game Geek and Wikipedia credit the game to a whopping FIVE designers. It definitely feels designed by committee, that’s for sure. Like a group of people sat around a conference table shouting out fragmented ideas for horror games for about a week straight and then decided to put every last one of them into a single product. Regardless of the accuracy of that notion and regardless of what the actual design process looked like, the end result is atrocious. Betrayal is a game without function or purpose, and there is no reason to ever subject yourself or your friends to it. If spooky houses are your thing, go play Mansions Of Madness. If you like the idea of a heavily randomized storytelling game, try Tales Of The Arabian Nights. For a decent medium-light hidden traitor game, give Shadows Over Camelot a go. None of those games are masterpieces, but they are a heck of a lot more interesting than the miserable experience that is Betrayal. And I’m well aware that it has successfully entrenched itself as a go-to gateway game for many groups — don’t forget Betrayal was one of my first as well — but there are hundreds of other games now that have similar broad appeal. Ones that don’t cause your brain to atrophy, no less. Thus, it’s long past time to retire Betrayal At House On The Hill for good, so we can focus on all the other smarter, tighter games that are actually worth critical consideration. And before you ask: no, I’m NOT talking about Betrayal Legacy.
Betrayal At House On The Hill gets a rating of ONE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHLESS.