

What were people afraid of in 1725 versus 1863? The content and flavor of each chapter could be fit to that period of history.” In the early 1800s, as Mary Shelley scared readers with Frankenstein, the haunts in Betrayal Legacy echo that unease that confronts the fears of science gone amok. And we end up in 2004, which allowed us in every chapter to look at that section of history, and think about what was scary at the time. “And every game you play goes forward roughly 25 years – about a generation. “The game itself starts in 1666, with the prologue,” Daviau explains. Each player takes on the role of a family and its many descendants, and plays members of that same family as they return time and again to the same site that so haunted their ancestors something (it would be a spoiler to know what) keeps dragging them back. Players watch it as it twists and reforms across the generations, terrifying and killing its visitors with new horrors fit to that era’s greatest fears. In a story spanning hundreds of years, it’s the enigmatic house up on the hill that is the true main character. The most intriguing aspect of Betrayal Legacy is its treatment of time, particularly the dynamics of family heritage, and the changing nature of horror across decades and centuries. You’re doing things like writing on things, ripping them up, and putting stickers down.
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So, you end up stringing together a series of board games almost like episodes in a TV series. “Not only is it different from your first game, but it’s probably different from someone else’s first game, because whatever decisions or actions they took in the first game will change their game in a different way. “Some of the actions you take in any one game will cause permanent changes to the game, so when you start the next game, it’s different,” Daviau says. In each, players follow a campaign from one session to the next and watch the way both the story and rules evolve in response to player choices. Rob Daviau was one of the original designers of Betrayal at House on the Hill, and he's now lead designer for Betrayal Legacyīeyond his experience working on the original Betrayal at House on the Hill, in more recent years, Daviau has been the originating and most strident representative in the design of legacy games, having co-designed projects including Risk Legacy, Pandemic Legacy, and SeaFall. “If Rob had said no, we probably wouldn’t have made the game.” “There was only one person that could possibly do Betrayal Legacy,” says brand manager Shelly Mazzanoble.

Rob Daviau has returned, this time as lead designer, to guide the creation of this new game being published by Avalon Hill. But imagine if every session you played had real consequences, and an ongoing story flowed from one game night to the next, completely shaped and customized by the decisions, victories, losses, and betrayals that came before.

At its core, the new game uses the same rules and formula that made the original game so fun. Well over a decade after the release of the first edition of Betrayal at House on the Hill, the new Betrayal Legacy is aiming for a release later this year. All of those come together to generate a story that relies on great haunted house tropes.” “Every time you go in, you’re going to get a different story, from the way the house is laid out, to how the house is haunted, to the characters, cards, and actions. “Essentially, Betrayal at House on the Hill is a haunted-house short-story generator, which was always appealing,” says Rob Daviau, one of the designers of the original game. The game encourages emergent stories, mixes horror with snippets of humor, and its modular tile system and multiple “haunts” keep the game replayable time and again. The formula is immediately intriguing: Join forces with your friends to cooperatively investigate a mysterious mansion, but with the knowledge that one of you might actually be a traitor, actively working to nefarious ends and the defeat of everyone else. Few thematic board games have done as much to draw new players to the hobby as Betrayal at House on the Hill.
