Machine-gun Spear Action

Last game I got to play yesterday was, what, a five players worth of Betrayal at the House on the Hill.

As I'm not familiar with the characters in the game, I'm not even trying to name them. We had two little kids (I was the smallest of the two), some sort of man, a professor and two ladies. Huh. Now that's a detailed description.

I think the idea behind the game is fantastic. A group of player characters wander inside a haunted mansion without actually knowing the objective, what haunts who or where, what or who the ultimate bad guy actually is. It does create an air of mystery to the game in a very different way I've seen in any board game.

The youngest character, my 8-year old little brat looked like she was main target for unfortunate accidents around the mansion... After she finds spear weapon she falls down from elevator all the way to basement. There she wanders into a room that has a pentagram on the floor, and in that very room something bites her.

The grown-ups who didn't bother to take care of the little girl when she fell down the elevator found some items that eventually triggered the stage 2 of game.

In next stage all hell breaks loose in the mansion and puny humans find supernatural horrors in a very concrete way.

The professor had played a lonely game in the upstairs. Somehow it was fitting, then, that the professor turned out to be the zombie lord.

Lesser zombies spawned all around the mansion and remaining characters made their way to upstairs.

Item use rules are quite weird in Betrayal at the House on the Hill. A character can use any and all items he or she has, then drop them to the floor for another character to pick up.

So, taking turns characters picked up the spear my character had found, though it didn't take many characters to finish off the zombie lord, as one player had a card to make any roll result of a roll to "2", and players had a few items that made rolls turn to "8" or added +4 to result.

Together with these the zombie lord was so easy that it left "Huh? That was it?" feeling at least for me.

Despite of the awkward ending this game is definitely worth looking into. I can almost see a SAW edition of this game.