Today I got to play games. A friend had a newly acquired game called Betrayal at the House on the Hill, so he brought it over so that we could all play it. It was fascinating. The opening part of the game has players exploring a haunted house, finding items (both good and bad), and setting up the gameboard. Then the haunting begins and one of the players becomes transformed into a monster. At that point the remaining players are given a set of objectives unknown to the monster. The monster has a different set of objectives unknown to the players. The first one to achieve objectives wins. It was like the best role playing because the story unfolded as we played. I got so wrapped up in the game play that I almost forgot to pick up Link from school.
Since we were playing games we decided to give a second game a chance. It was called Shadows Over Camalot. It was complex, but I loved the way that all the players work cooperatively to try to beat the forces of evil. Link got involved and once Kiki got home so did she(I set a timer to remind me to pick her up).
Now the games are all over and I’m left wanting more. I loved being able to tune out the world and play with people who were just as interested as I was. Fortunately I knew the gaming session was coming far enough in advance that I was able to rent movies to keep Gleek and Patches happy. Unfortunately neither of these games is cheap, and as much as I’d like to, I won’t be able to afford them anytime soon.
Amazing, amazing, amazing game. One time the monster was a girl turning the house into an abyss, tile by tile, as the others try to escape. Great game.
Oooh! Cool!
I got to be two headed snake that was trying to crush the house before the players could marshall their resources and kill both heads. They won, but only just barely.
I really want to play again, but the friend took the game home. 🙁
Ooooh! I played that game at PAX a couple weekends ago. It was one of the coolest games I played all weekend – the roleplaying aspect was kinda cool, but the team planning we had to engage in to carry out our objectives was great. And the way the game unfolded was downright cinematic – the bad guy missed what should have been an easy attempt to kill the last remaining good guy, and the both of them then had a race to the room where the good guy could complete the ritual to stop the bad guy’s magic… but then the good guy failed the ritual roll, and the bad guy caught up and finished him off. We lost, but it was an awesomely cool way to end.
I spent most of two weekends in a row doing little else other than tabletop gaming, and I’m already craving more…
I feel the same way about board games but (for the most part) I have no one to play with. Which is likely a good thing or I would never get anything productive done!
Ooh! I work at a game store in Illinois, and Betrayal is one of my favorite games to sell. I think the best part of it is that it’s super-replayable. I’ll have to add “random webcomic author’s wife” to my list of people that enjoyed it.
Oh, great. Now I’m “random.”
You can add a plug from me if you’d like. I really, really enjoyed the game, and would play it again in a heartbeat.
–Howard
It’s easier to sell games when I don’t go full on fanboy for five minutes. Which I do when trying to explain Schlock.
Sometimes my brain meanders back to when we used to play Rifts, you know, before we had too many kids between us and times were less busy…
good times….good times…. 🙂