Betrayal at House on the Hill – Widow’s Walk Expansion

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Category: Age: 12+ 60 - Min 3 - 6 Players 2016

Game Summary

Set-Up Ease: Just place the Entrance! and get all the other stuff out of the box!4 / 5 Gameplay Ease: No Rules ...Almost! 5 / 5 Replay Value: All games are completely different. Period. 5 / 5 Thematic: Have you seen a b-horror movie ? Now you can live the experience! 5 / 5
Overall Rating: Allthough its a very simple game I could play any time! Even Now! 10 / 10

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You have just entered… The door locks behind you… You and your friends are stuck here and cannot get out! Not Yet! The only way to survive is to gather your strength and courage and start looking for answers… and a way out… hoping that you will find it and get out alive! …but you won’t… not all of you… Someone will betray… someone will get out while others will not….

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Finally! One of my favorite thematic games got an expansion!

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a cooperative game! To a point! …Until someone betrays the others or something happens that changes the whole balance of relationships!

You are locked in a House on a Hill, strange things happen and the only way to survive is to explore the rooms and floors of the house, collect items that might help you on the way and try to help your fellow partners hoping that when the time comes, they will not turn against you in order to survive. We can call this the first phase… Where we all happily explore the rooms of the house and find objects or get into weird situations.

On the second phase and after some conditions are met, the game changes completely and from the “exploration“ phase you get into a survival mode! You must fight strange things or your “fellow mates” in order to survive and get out alive! The game uses a nice mechanic to connect the room you are in, with the card you draw to create a story and the twist of the game, where in most cases someone will betray the team and join the evil forces and fight against the others in order to win! Then the group splits into two groups, the survivors and the betrayer. Both get a “Tome” and read the same story but from a different aspect… Their own point of view! Each “Tome” refers to the situation and what must be done in order to win the game but not everything is revealed! As the game progresses, you begin to figure out what is going on and unravel the whole story! Most of the times in the end only one side will win…

In the first part you explore the house and do certain things, without much strategy or planning needed. On the second part though, you start building strategies and ways to fight and survive which really puts you in the game and tension rises sooooo high! You get a feeling like playing in a horror movie or even living the adventure!

The reason I love this game is because anyone can play it, from non-gamers to hardcore gamers as it is very easy to play with literally few rules to explain and remember. This gives you space to just enjoy the game in its fullness!

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The Widow’s Walk expansion adds 20 new rooms to the house and a new unexplored floor The Roof. New items, events, omens and 50 new haunts are introduced in the expansion! Player, monster and room tokens are also included, but the additions that really affect the game are the two new icons that appear on the room tiles! The one is the dumbwaiter which lets you move from that room one floor up or down. This means you don’t have to wait for tiles that take you to other floors (e.g. stairs tile) to appear so you will be able go this floor . The second is a question mark which allows you to draw a card from a deck of your choice! Which is really cool to have that option!

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The only thing that is not included neither in this expansion nor in the base-game and I think would affect the game significantly is adding a unique ability to each character, according to its age and personality. With this expansion the game doesn’t change dramatically but it gives you more stuff of everything, more haunts which is all you need and the fuel to play over and over again….

Ooooh! …And don’t forget to have background music!!! Definitely! When the music blends with the game in times of agony and creates a live soundtrack then it gives you the chills!

PS. We have include in the Hidden Dungeon an unofficial expansion for the base game made by fans, with 20 haunts and rules to play!

betrayal-review

Recommended Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bR_O1a_x_8&list=PLmO4kIhX9jQ45M1el7GFCktAo5K0s6lCG