Betrayal at House on the Hill third edition revealed with 50 new haunts

House on the Hill: BetrayalThe classic horror-themed board game “The Ghost” has been an established favorite for those looking to introduce players to new board games. But the original is not without its flaws, including droopy miniatures, delicate cardboard components, and a subset of rules that don’t quite work. While the second edition smoothed out many of those issues, the newly formed team at Hasbro’s Avalon Hill is doubling down on the franchise’s popularity with an all-new edition.

Betrayal at House on the Hill: 3rd Edition It will arrive in time for Gen Con, the American tabletop gaming convention. Polygon has the first details on the game — including two new trailers.

BetrayalThe original version was released in 2004. A second edition was published in 2010. The game allows you to navigate the many floors of the haunted mansion and create the floor plan with random tiles. The Omen cards, which slowly increase the tension in the game by displaying mystery at every corner of the house, indicate that there is a lot more to the game than meets the eye. Once the Haunt is triggered, players collect items to continue exploring the game. That’s when the cooperative game turns adversarial with one player, dubbed the Traitor, working to kill the others off before time runs out. The game received an expansion in 2016, a Dungeons & Dragons-themed edition in 2017, and a legacy-style campaign version designed by Rob Daviau in 2018.

Chris Nadeau (senior director, product development lead, Avalon Hill), said that the new edition contains 50 brand-new haunts. There are also sequels and old favourites. They’ve all been designed to run more smoothly at the table, and collated into five different thematic buckets. This will streamline your experience and give it a more theme-driven tone.

“We felt the house is really the main character of the story,” Nadeau said in an interview last month. “And so getting a little deeper into fleshing that out — What does it look like, sound like, smell like, taste like? Is there any visuals to help me do that? — [can]You can really bring out the flavor. […]Some of these foundational elements will be provided by us. [to players] and build upon that going forward.”

Nadeau stated that the goal is to treat BetrayalThis product is much more like an entire game system and not a single boxed item. Fans should look forward to many more expansions. It’s the same model used for the recent reboot of HeroQuestThe newest version of the – which has multiple expansions, and promises more.

“Making sure that they have a limitless appetite of new haunts,” Nadeau said, “being able to introduce more story into where those haunts are going, and be able to allow players the opportunity to go beyond the core game are all things that we were looking at going forward.”

Polygon was told by Nadeau that Betrayal’s third edition will include redesigned sliders and character cards, which should improve usability out of the box and contribute to durability down the line. It will also include heroic-scale miniatures — that is, characters with larger facial features, hands, and held items — perfect for players who want to paint them up. They also won’t be quite so bendy as previous editions. His team chose the same type of plastic as in previous editions. HeroQuest. The game will also include new rules for a “reluctant traitor,” which will allow new players to sidestep the game’s more challenging haunts and gracefully hand off the reins to more experienced players if they choose to.

“It can be a very difficult experience for somebody who is sitting down at the strategy gaming table for the first time with their friends on a Friday night and suddenly you roll them as the traitor and they’re isolated out from the rest of the group,” Nadeau said. “We want to […] delicately give them the option to be able to opt out of that scenario, to put the second half of the game in the hands of one of the veterans at the table in a fair way that’s not going to embarrass that person or make them feel any less for being the newb at the table.”

You might like HeroQuest Risk Shadow ForcesNadeau stated that this is the third edition in a series of legacy-style games. House on the Hill: Betrayal is intended to reassert Avalon Hill’s authority in the hobby games space — and to give modern board gamers more of the richly themed experiences that they’re looking for.

“We know from a lot of our data that I think gamers are starting to get tired of collecting thatch, and wood, and stone,” Nadeau said. “They want a little bit more reason for being. We want them to have a bit more substance in their games, so that we can deliver it. We want to be able to give that part over to every one of the games that we create.”

House on the Hill: Betrayal The retail price will be $55.99 The European premiere will take place on April 1. It will then be released worldwide starting on August 1. You can order the game online at Entertainment Earth, Big Bad Toy Store and Hasbro Pulse starting March 1st.