Betrayal (at House on the Hill)

An alternative title to this could be: Sad State of Gaming in the Philippines part 2.

Lets start with the story on how I got a hold on my copy…
I received word from pointyman2000 that the local “distributor” of everything gaming had House on the Hill on sale for cheap (if you consider 65$ cheap, in comparison of course to some other site’s 90$). Of course I had to get my moxie on. I gasped as I saw that they had new stock in boardgames! This after they announced that they weren’t going to supply the local scene with the stuff. Of course I had to get some prices, namely my future targets that I saw on the shelves: Arkham Horror (Dunwich Expansion) ,Twilight Imperium & some other titles which I forget.

All of them went for one price: 110$. Any gamer worth his salt knows this is a rip-off, any person who can enter a search string in Google or Amazon, can find this to be a rip-off. For Twilight Imperium that’s almost twice it’s Amazon cost. For the Dunwich Horror expansion that’s 10$ less of three times the Amazon cost! Does shipping this stuff here cost so much?

I may have bought House on the Hill for a price more that a little snooping and interweb know-how could have saved me (+ shipping). I don’t regret buying it for that price, I do regret where I bought it.

Disclaimer: All prices are approximated and rounded off due to the Philippine Peso-American Dollar exchange calculations. Furthermore, that is officially the last time the local “distributor” sees the color of my money.

A band of explorers steels themselves, as the bloom of night enters full swing, they enter the front doors. The “why” is no longer important, all that is important now is their survival as they realize the front doors close behind them, and lock…

The game feels something straight out of a horror movie with a Scooby-Doo feel, a bunch of people searching a possibly (just filled with weirdos, or huge vermin) or very haunted house (ghosts, demons, and witches! Oh my!) where the villain and his underlings have yet to make their appearance.

House on the Hill is different from many of the board games plainly because there is no board. The house is assembled through tiles which are placed down the more you explore, making the house different for every game. Exploring certain rooms will force you to draw a card: an event, an item, or an omen card. The fun starts when the haunt starts (from having too many omen cards in play and a low roll), which of course is random depending on which omen card you drew and where you drew it. Random rooms, random villain, random villain plot.

The haunt determines what kind of stabbity-fun happens in the house, like I said, from the traitor opening a window to let a horde of vampire bats fill the house, to demons being summoned in the Pentagram Chamber, to the house being occupied by cannibal freaks (the game’s own terms).

It’s a fun, lighthearted, albeit horror inclined, game meant for short to medium length time intervals.

Board Game Day – Arkham Horror

Just last week a few friends and I decided to try and test run a game that I bought for my girlfriend: Fantasy Flight Games’ version of Arkham Horror. To anyone unfamiliar with the Cthulhu Mythos, Arkham is a fictional city in Massachusetts featured in many of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft and other Cthulhu Mythos writers.

The board game centers on the premise of playing investigators trying to save Arkham from an otherworldly invasion. Gates to other dimensions are opening all over the city, and it’s up to the investigators to locate, explore, close and seal these gates to stop the steady stream of monsters pouring through. Unfortunately it’s not just 1920’s monster stomping. In addition to the small monsters seeping through to this reality, one of the Great Old Ones is waiting to make it’s entrance into the world.

The only way to stop this invasion is to seal six gates before time runs out… or else the investigators must them get into a completely knock-down-drag-out fight with the big bad itself. This is no easy feat as the Great Old Ones tend to have pretty nasty powers that seriously inhibit the investigators trying to put up a fight.

Overall I found this game to be pretty fun. The tension of trying to stop all the gates before the monsters overrun the town was a great driving factor to how desperate the situation is for the investigators. In addition the game also has other means of making things difficult, as an overabundance of monsters can raise the “Terror Level” in Arkham, making residents pack up and leave. The end result of this is that the stores that sell important weapons or gear start closing, leaving the investigators with less potential resources to combat the threat.

My only complaint with the game is that the rules take a very careful read through (and has to be augmented with reading the FAQ on the Fantasy Flight Games website) just to get a handle of some of the situations. For example, one situation that I can’t figure out is what happens if an investigator reaches a location with both a monster and a gate. Is the monster fight resolved first? Or is the Investigator sucked into the gate immediately without having to fight or evade the said monster? It’s a tad frustrating, but the overall game experience was more than enough to get over that little nitpick.

Would I recommend a purchase? Definitely. Even those unfamiliar with the Mythos will enjoy the escalating danger, and the extremely well made components of this game. The artwork is evocative and the board is beautiful. It’s well worth the price of admission in my honest opinion.