by jon_joy_1999
This question is answered in[q="Errata revised 10/26/05"]If the traitor ends up with the Bell and successfully makes the sanity roll of 5+, does he get to move as many heroes as he wants in his direction?Yes.
Yes.
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Reply: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: Rules:: Re: Instant loss by Bell (Haunt#37)
Yes.
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Thread: Machi Koro Legacy:: General:: Sticker question (SPOILERS?)
by ski6913
We played our first four games today, and I had a question about one of the components:[o]Upon opening the box, we came across a sheet of “bamboo garden” and “waterfall” stickers. Am I correct in assuming those don’t come into use until later in the campaign? It seemed weird to me that a component that isn’t used until later in the campaign (and which possibly provides minor spoilers) would just be thrown in the game box with no explanation and not stuck in a mystery box or envelope, but it seems like that’s what’s happened.[/o]
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Reply: Machi Koro Legacy:: General:: Re: Got my game. Based on the weight of the secrets-boxes, I think this game should have been half the size it is.
by ski6913
After opening the first 3 boxes, you’re absolutely right. We’re having a blast with the game, but the game box could have been half the size and still had room to spare.↧
Reply: Machi Koro Legacy:: General:: Re: Sticker question (SPOILERS?)
by Shoone
I was thinking thinking the same thing! Just finished our 4th game as well.↧
Reply: Unmatched: Battle of Legends, Volume One:: General:: Re: Order Arrived from Restoration!
by frankqb
Well, i’m Sorry to hear that. There’s a page somewhere that’s recording results for stay tracking, if you want to contribute to that.↧
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Reply: Unmatched: Battle of Legends, Volume One:: General:: Re: Order Arrived from Restoration!
by rbf1138
Would love to know how I’m 100 orders ahead and don’t have any tracking info/shipping notice yet. I’m also in Atlanta, closer to Florida, so I don’t know why I wouldn’t have received it before someone in Oklahoma. Kicking myself for having paid extra to order from Restoration, seeing as it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting it any earlier than online game stores and I paid more for that benefit.↧
Reply: Machi Koro Legacy:: General:: Re: Sticker question (SPOILERS?)
by Hansolo88
They are referenced later, just hang on to them... Can't say more without spoiling↧
Reply: Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar – Spider Springs:: General:: Re: Update to the Restoration Games/Fireball Island Ap
Very soon. Like, real soon.
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Reply: Unmatched: Battle of Legends, Volume One:: General:: Re: Available at Essen?
Nothing to announce yet, and Essen seems unlikely given the timing. We do hope to announce something soon though.
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Thread: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: General:: I dislike this game. I would like some fresh perspectives from people who love it.
by daydreams
Hello everyone.Now I just want to give some preface before I begin writing this thread.
I have played I would say roughly… over 20 games of Betrayal. In my board game group there is someone who loves this game, and she will adamantly vouch for this game whenever we meet up. I, and several others in my group, dislike this game a good bit. We however still play this game on game night because we prioritize the coming together of everyone more so than our own personal biases towards board game tastes.
I don’t want this thread to come off as a personal offense towards anyone. I don’t dislike anyone who likes this game. I don’t think someone’s opinion about another individual should be swayed by what they do/don’t enjoy. We are all passionate about the games we love, it’s a great thing. Such feelings undoubtedly bring strong emotions with it. And all in all I wish to be not antagonistic to anyone who has such sentiment to this game.
I also want to give warning that this post may be really long; brevity is not really something that I’m good at when it comes to writing things that are on my mind. I tend to go on and on. I will put a TLDR at the end of this post for those that wish to skip what I have to say.
With all of this being said,
I hate the fact that I dislike this game.
I love board games. I’m the ‘teacher’ of my circle of friends who will go out of my way to encourage the rest of us to schedule a night, sit down, and play a board game we love or learn a new one. It is the social activity I probably enjoy the most. I love it especially when people who are new to the hobby play a game and they fall in love with it. It brings me so much happiness to see that.
And with this game, there’s a very good friend of mine that loves it I am very adamant about my disdain towards it.
I know that what people like and tastes and such are subjective. I know it’s unrealistic for me to like every board game in existence. However I try to at least get something positive out of anything, whether it be board games or any other activity. I feel that a person’s frame of mind and the outlook they have on an activity impacts their experience tremendously.
So what I am trying to do is to have an open mind, and to ask all of you who really enjoy this game what you love about it the most.
Doing my best to look at Betrayal at House on the Hill on an objective level, I feel that the game’s strength comes when you get immersed in the theme of it. This game has such an interesting theme. Being part of a group of explorers searching a haunted house, getting into paranormal and creepy encounters, and finding forbidden omens and treasure is such a gripping subject matter. I feel that it would make anyone even somewhat interested in playing it.
I also feel that another strength of the game is the role-play element of it. I think it’s natural that to be engaged in the theme you want to live out the character that you’re playing. Stories are constantly developing because of the nature of the omens and the events of the game and it provides something to keep you engaged in it. It’s great.
What I really, really, dislike about this game are the character statistics and the pacing of this game for the end result.
The statistics sound interesting. Every character has 4 different traits, 2 physical and 2 mental. These act as health levels and you keep track of them on your own character board. Each character has different starting statistics and you can upgrade them through different cards and/or events as the game goes on. You can equip items on yourself and it effects your stats. Sounds good.
On a personal note:
It all. Feels. So. Pointless. In. The. End.
This game is divided into two halves, the exploration of the house and then the haunt. The haunt is made to be a very decisive and important moment where the traitor is revealed, and the act before it I feel is supposed to be the part where you prepare for the inevitable. You want to get stronger and stronger for whatever threat or objective that will appear in the haunt book. It also imparts fear and worry in that if one person becomes really powerful and they become the traitor then they would have the advantage.
In my experience, you use your character statistics mostly for checks against rooms, omens, etc. Your goal is to pass these checks so you don’t suffer a health penalty, or you want to pass them to draw an item card as a reward. The reward is more often than not something that increases your statistics or allows you to re-roll dice. And it goes without saying that you don’t want to take damage.
So best case scenario you get strong, pass checks, get stronger by getting items, pass more checks, and the cycle goes on.
But I feel that there’s nothing to reward you for getting stronger.
There’s no objective prior to the haunt; the only real goal is to explore a good amount of the house because some of the haunts (I’ll talk about those later, dear goodness) require specific tiles to be laid out for the non-traitors to complete their tasks. Other than that the speed statistic is probably the one I feel impacts people the most because that lets players run away faster and get to already explored areas of the house sooner than later. You don’t feel the impact when you explore the house because your characters stops on an omen ( I might be mistaken, I’m talking about the card that has the raven on it that triggers the haunt roll not the cards that have the spiral on them).
So because of this your goal is to get stronger for the sake of being strong, and you want to be strong so you pass the dice checks. Your biggest reward for passing the dice checks is stuff that makes you stronger. You also want to be strong so you can be good at the haunt. You don’t know what the haunt is going to be, or who the traitor is going to be, but you want to be strong just in case.
On a personal note:
This feels like grinding in a videogame RPG.
To play devil’s advocate I feel that the focus of those cards isn’t the statistics, it’s the story. All of the equip cards and the event cards have a lot of flavor text meant to satisfy the immersion of the player who triggered them. I can understand that.
The thing that breaks the immersion for me is that everything gets tied back to the statistics. For something that shouldn’t be the highlight of an immersive, theme-based game all of the game seems to point back to increasing or decreasing those numbers. If I walk into a room and it’s filled with giant spiders and webs, and I manage to fight my way out through strength, my reward of that event later on in the game is that I moved up the tracker on my strength stat by 1. I then move on. My strength can go down by one again if a teddy bear stabs me my next turn. I may not even need strength in the haunt.
Everything feels like fluff for this really simple, unsatisfying numbers game.
I want to be immersed. I want to open a door, have it be filled with giant spiders, slam the door and then run away with my remaining speed. I want the spiders to break the door down and chase me. I want my partner next to me to run from the kitchen down stairs, up to the 2nd level to where I’m at, see the spiders, and throw a torch at the room, burning up the webs. I want to hide in the chapel and I want the other player with the gun to line up a shot and kill the spider who was chasing me. I want her to miss, and I want the bullet to go all the way to the bedroom, shoot a teddy bear, and I want the teddy bear to come to life and fly towards her. I want crazy, super cool and thematic moments like that in a game like this.
This game to me feels like Dungeons and Dragons, but a very, very limited version of it. And I don’t even like Dungeons and Dragons ( please don’t kill me).
So anyway the first half of the game goes on, people get stronger (or weaker, that happens a lot) and the haunt eventually triggers. Everyone gets really worried, and the haunt starts based off of the last tile that was drawn and the last raven card that was pulled.
On a personal note:
This feels so unsatisfying.
I could have the intention of wanting to be the betrayer the entire game. I do the most risky options for those dice checks in hopes of being stronger than anyone around me so I can out do them. And then it’s not me.
I could have the intention ( and this has happened a LOT ) of not wanting to be the betrayer, either because I’m weak and I’m about to die or I just don’t want to be one and the game chooses me.
In my own games with my game group we house rule it on whoever wants to be the traitor gets to be it.
Good lord… the house rules… I’m getting off track.
Playing devil’s advocate, this provides replay value. A ton of it. The haunt book has so many scenarios that technically a group can just play this game and it will provide new experiences each and every time.
On a personal note:
GOOD LORD THAT HAUNT BOOK OH MY GOSH
I cannot go over in good length what my game group has done to that haunt book. It is absolutely filled (FILLED!) with post it notes, highlighter marks, red sticker things, you name it about haunts that we’ll never play again, haunts that are okay, parts of the haunt we choose to not play with, so on and so forth. It’s also a great time where we get a haunt we’ve played before and we pick one at random, that feels really not right.
I hate house rules. All of these additions other people in my game group have done. I look for a nice structure when I play a game that provides a great experience.
Those haunts, to be very frank, are awful. I can’t remember any of them that I’ve had a good time from. The things I do remember are the constant house ruling of things.
My most vivid memory of a haunt is where us as the non-betrayers had to do a dice check on 3 rooms, 2 that we had not discovered yet. So our goal then was to keep exploring the house in hopes of finding the rooms we needed. We then needed to do a really high sanity check on each of the three rooms. The game ended where we two of us died and we had just found the last room. We didn’t get a chance to do any of the sanity checks. The only statistics that mattered to us where how quick we could discover the house (each of us were just as quick as the other) how fast we could move around the traitor (speed) and how high our sanity was for the checks. We didn’t fight anything. There was this really weird story that we really didn’t care about, we just wanted to find those dang tiles that we were unlucky enough to find. The betrayer was having a good time (he had the easiest objective ever) and we were just suffering. It was awful.
Playing devils advocate, I feel that that experience that had happened to us was something that we should have taken lightly. It should be about the story, the moment, the experience, etc.
On a personal note:
It just felt really unfair. We knew we couldn’t win. And the story that made up before the haunt happened did not make a lick of sense with what we were doing now.
It all just feels like chaos. I feel that this game wants to tell good stories, but I’d rather be around a bonfire with beers telling ghost stories then using this game to provide that opportunity.
Okay, so all in all, I think I’m just taking this game way too seriously in the wrong direction. In every game I’ve played of this for a really long time I’ve tried to role-play and be caught up in the theme as much as I can. And my problem is that I still find nothing to do in the beginning other than that playing that number game I really dislike and then later on play a haunt that can just break everything.
TLDR: Betrayal at House on the Hill is a super thematic game meant to immerse players in this cool haunted house, and I really dislike the character statistics and the haunts of this game.
So now I am asking all of you who enjoy this game to share your experiences. I feel like I’ve hit a wall in my attempts of trying to enjoy this game and I feel like I could use a fresh perspective.
And again, I am not trying to be antagonistic. These are my experiences with this game, and unfortunately they weren’t the best. I would love to hear some better experiences as opposed to mine.
Thank you.
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Reply: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: General:: Re: I dislike this game. I would like some fresh perspectives from people who love it.
by Valcurdra
This is a huge post I got about 33% through.I like this game a lot, I just think it's one you play to see what happens and enjoy the story unfolding. But not necessarily to win.
The slow pacing at the start is good as it gives time for new players or distracted ones to settle in and learn the basics rules before all the special rules kick in.
1 player betraying the group, leaving the room and having secret objectives is just plain awesome!
The game is super thematic and touches on all the classic, cool horror troupes.
The rules are loose in many areas but as a prolific house ruler I find it easy to make a call on how things work.
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Reply: Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar – Spider Springs:: General:: Re: Update to the Restoration Games/Fireball Island Ap
by Quartzquiz
Thanks for the very fast reply! 😁↧
Reply: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: General:: Re: I dislike this game. I would like some fresh perspectives from people who love it.
by SilentMix
I think it's fair to not like the game. The game *is* really random. From what your stats end up, to the items you get, to the house placements, to the haunt itself... Some of the haunts feel extremely biased towards one side or the other winning too. For those, I feel like unless you got really lucky with the items you picked up during the exploration phase, then you probably won't win. Room placement can sometimes help or harm you too, but you won't know that in advance.I enjoy the game, but it's mainly for the theme and the unpredictability about it.
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Reply: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: General:: Re: I dislike this game. I would like some fresh perspectives from people who love it.
That was a really really long post - and I honestly still can't figure what you want.
Games are meant to have fun. If you don't have fun, don't play the game.
Not all games are for all people.
In particular, it seems that you have issues not just witht he game but with the way your group plays.
You say you don't like houserules but your group keeps adding them - that has nothing to do with the game.
We don't use any house rules in this game.
As for this game - yes. It's completely random. It's not meant to be a heavy strategy game. There is no key to victory.
If you'll pardon the expression, anyone who writes such a lengthy post that tries to analyze the crap out of it is not going to like the game.
Just talk to your group and tell them that it's more important for people not to play a game they hate than everyone being "together" and not have any fun.
Games are meant to have fun. If you don't have fun, don't play the game.
Not all games are for all people.
In particular, it seems that you have issues not just witht he game but with the way your group plays.
You say you don't like houserules but your group keeps adding them - that has nothing to do with the game.
We don't use any house rules in this game.
As for this game - yes. It's completely random. It's not meant to be a heavy strategy game. There is no key to victory.
If you'll pardon the expression, anyone who writes such a lengthy post that tries to analyze the crap out of it is not going to like the game.
Just talk to your group and tell them that it's more important for people not to play a game they hate than everyone being "together" and not have any fun.
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Reply: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: General:: Re: I dislike this game. I would like some fresh perspectives from people who love it.
by baboonov
This game is chaotic , random and obtuse; to enjoy it , you never should take it seriously and house rule to your heart's content.Also, beer and pretzels help:p
P.s. i'm mostly a eurogamer, but still manage to enjoy this, mostly because i don't take it seriously.
P.s.2 you are not alone in your dislike of D&D
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Reply: Cthulhu: Death May Die:: News:: Re: French interview with representatives of CMON and Asmodee
by Olerock
that's a very interesting looking episode! if all the episodes are that unique, i'm going to love this game.↧
Reply: Return to Dark Tower:: General:: Re: First Look at Prototype Tower
GamingCoupleGA wrote:
Wow.. so not a better Dark Tower but a Co-Op and much different game that barely shares any similarity except the name of the original?
Correct. It wasn't meant to be the same game. Not sure where that was mentioned.
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Reply: Betrayal at House on the Hill:: General:: Re: I dislike this game. I would like some fresh perspectives from people who love it.
by willshaw67
daydreams wrote:
I hate the fact that I dislike this game.
Don’t feel obliged to like the game just because others like it. You like what you like and if you dislike something then that’s fine. Don’t waste time and effort trying to like something that just isn’t for you.
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Reply: Mountains of Madness:: Strategy:: Re: Any reason to NOT ascend every turn?
by jimmyfrizz
HCSo wrote:
I guess it depends on if your team is OK with barely winning or want to win with some kudos.
Exactly, gathering relics is literally the point of the game, so finishing with barely enough is a flawed victory. My group focus on trying to beat the last score we got, effectively ramping up the difficulty each time we play.
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Reply: Betrayal Legacy:: Rules:: Re: Game reset
by Ruesailmana
KogarashiKaze wrote:
jon_joy_1999 wrote:
It also doesn't say to reset item cards or the room tile stack. I think was intended that, if you wanted to, you could play without resetting any of these stacks and have a more consistent game of Betrayal, but I'm not sure.
The legacy deck cards actually tell you to shuffle all the item and event cards into their respective decks.
They do?
we are going to play chapter 2 since finishing chapter 1 almost a year ago, so I was looking for what I had todo with the item, omen, event and house tile piles and was confused by that the shuffling rule was only for free play
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