Showing posts with label haunted house. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haunted house. Show all posts

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Finally - Betrayal at House of The Hill

 




Around three years ago just when I was getting ready to move to a new town, I only had free antenna TV for several weeks. It was on one of those channels that I discovered Will Wheaton's Geek and Sundry show Tabletop. All the board games I currently love, besides Digital Talisman, were purchased after seeing them on episodes of that show. Dead of Winter; King of Tokyo, Epic Spell wars. My love of board games, never really a thing for me outside of Talisman, had begun. 

Because my travelling friends B and L are back in town for a few months, I went ahead and pushed the button on one I've wanted a long time so I could try it out with them. That game was Betrayal at House on The Hill. The best thing about B and L, besides being my besties in town, is that these games are newish to them as well. The local board gaming community has long since moved on from these games (usually to often abstract worker and resource allocation things I find boring), but they are kind of new to us. Even something like Dead of Winter feels newish, as each game we play seems very different from the last. 

Hilariously, most bad reviews on Amazon for Betrayal are from mothers who bought it for their kids expecting Lugosi Dracula or Karloff Frankenstein to be the foes (versions of these characters are in the game), but found it to have demonic/satanic elements. Well, yeah, if you come up with 50 different hauntings to create the end game, you are going to hit pretty much all genres. Devils, spirits, ghosts, demons, etc. Personally I love the concept of demons, and they are far more fun to me than other creatures you might find chasing Abbot and Costello around in the 50's.



In the game you explore three  floors of the haunted house. The ground floor, second floor, and basement. As you move from room to room you reveal a room tile. Though the room description might be "dining room," "laboratory," or crypt, etc, what is important is if there is a card to be taken and revealed. Three card types in three piles are there and depending on the symbol you will get an item, event, or omen. They might all help or hinder you in some way, but the omen cards are the most important to the game. For each omen you have in play, you must roll under that number each time a new omen is revealed. If you fail, the haunt phase begins. You cross reference the room with the omen just pulled on a chart and you find out what the haunt is and who is the traitor. 



The character cards are two sided, and each opposite side seems to a very different person, though they kept them similar looking enough so the included miniature for each can be used for either. The young high school quarterback on one side, a lineman looking guy on the other side. The male child figure represents either a Caucasian boy or a Japanese boy. A professor, a priest, a fortune teller, a Hispanic lady. All have their own stats. The physical stats being might and speed, and mental being sanity and knowledge. Attacks could harm any of them and reduce them. But you can't usually die until after a Haunt starts. 

So each character goes from room to room, encountering events, items, and omens. These can be helpful or hurtful things (helpful items might be a spear that helps you fight or a set of armor). Omen cards will eventually lead to a Haunt. 

When the haunt occurs, somebody is going to be a traitor. It may be whoever revealed the last omen card, or it could be somebody else. You cross reference a chart with that omen card and the location where it is found, and you have a Haunt on your hands. Somebody maybe turns into a werewolf, or maybe a controller of demons who sends them to hunt you down. There are 50 such haunts, some more powerful than others. One may leave you little chance of winning. Another might be a breeze. But is always fun, and it all pans out as a great little story. And experiencing that story is one of the things I love about it. A game like this promotes role play. In a game like that, I might have my character do something less about what might let him win, and what I think that character would do. Winning is just icing on the cake. 

One downside right now is that we have played like 5 games, and two of those had a repeat haunt. That is not really supposed to happen, you know, with 50 different haunts. I've seen online that people will play a couple dozen games and never get the same haunt. 

Our getting repeats has maybe made us a bit tired of it already. And to be honest, the pre-haunt exploration portion of the game at this point for us has the same rooms and same events and items popping up. So be are taking a break now to play the DandD version Betrayal at Baldurs Gate. 

Yesterday after a Dead of Winter session that had us lose to the apocalypse in record time, we broke open Baldurs Gate and had a run through. It played very much like House, but with fun DandD themed differences. 

I'll probably post at that version after a couple more plays. But I'll say for now that House is a great and fairly easy (until the Haunt) game I think anybody would have fun with, though in my case the replay value is short. But there is at least one expansion for the game, Widows Walk, which adds another level, the roof, and probably some other stuff. I may get that before too long just to check it out and freshen up the main game. 



Cheers

Friday, February 18, 2011

Dark Shadows






Since I got Netflix awhile back, I’ve been catching up on some of my favorite childhood shows that are available on the instant play feature. So on some nights since the holidays I’ve been watching a lot of The Rockford Files and Kolchak:The Night Stalker.

But with me having Tegel Manor on the mind a lot in the last few months, and possibly doing a sort of sequel to that great module for my OD&D games, I remember that unique soap opera from the 60’s called Dark Shadows.

Dark Shadows’ original show story bible had no supernatural elements, despite being mostly set in a spooky old mansion on the New England coast. Besides the unusual setting, Dark Shadows featured the typical romantic and dramatic subplots of the usual daytime soap opera. Some six months into its run the show introduced the supernatural by having characters encounter ghosts. But when flagging ratings threatened to end the series, the character of Barnabas Collins was introduced. A polite and unflappable man who claimed to be a lost cousin of the Collins family living in the Collinswood mansion, Barnabas was actually a 200 year old vampire, released from a local tomb by a trouble making drifter.

I was but an infant during the show’s original run, but as a kid I discovered the it through reruns on UHF, and loved it. Flash forward to the 90’s, I had another chance to see a couple of episodes, and was bored as hell. But inspired to check it out again now, I’ve watched several of the first Barnabas episodes and I’m loving it.

For one thing, the frequent stock footage of Collinswood outside at night and day looks just like the outline of Tegel Manor! And the interiors of Collinswood and the dilapidated old house next door practically screams “Tegel!” Even Barnabas’ speech early on describing the creation of Collinswood from local lumber and imported stone seems to be a description of the building of the great house of Tegel. This is super inspiring stuff for Tegel adventuring.

Many scenes so far also take place at the ramshackle but cozy seaside tavern The Blue Whale. The bar has its own sort of haunting moodiness, but that is broken up by the constant Beatnik music in the background and the surprisingly lovely 60’s chicks, both featured actresses and background extras, enjoying their cocktails the way the 60’s folk seemed to love to do.

The episodes are only 20 minutes long, and last night I actually watched around four of them back to back for mood as I was working on my Tegel Manor material. This is going to be a stormy weekend in Southern California, so I plan to watch a lot of DS. I understand that in upcoming episodes there will be homage’s to werewolves, Frankenstein, and even Rider’s “She.” Time travel, parallel universes, and “The Levianthans,” old dark gods in the HP Lovecraft mold, are going to be featured as well.

If you’ve never seen Dark Shadows, do yourself a favor and check it out. Just be sure to start with the first Barnabas episodes. Otherwise you are just watching a soap opera set in and old house. Yawn.

Note: Tim Burton is working on a Dark Shadows film this very minute, with Johnny Depp as Barnabas. I really don’t want to see a campy, Cirque De Soliel trannyfest that Burton might make of it, and I am tired as hell of Johnny Depp. The one saving grace is apparently Depp has been a fan of the show since childhood, so hopefully that will add something special to his portrayal of the iconic vampire.