My custom Betrayal At House On The Hill Haunt : ‘The Night We Were Dead By Dawn’
I used to hate board games. I’m impatient, not especially competitive and hate losing. Today, I made a custom game.
Monopoly ruined me. The moment someone pulled out a board game I’d panic. I was worried I’d flip the table because I wasn’t having fun. I know now that I probably wasn’t playing the right games. A few years back my sister had a board game party. I played Settlers of Catan, King Of Tokyo, Ticket to Ride and Sheriff of Nottingham. Monopoly was nowhere to be found. I became a board game freak overnight.
Now I feel like I’ve taken it a step further. I’ve fallen down the slippery slope of creating my own games, starting with a custom campaign for the classic horror game Betrayal at House on the Hill.
Betrayal At House On The Hill
This was the first board game I bought. I knew I wanted it the second I watched it played on the web series Tabletop. Betrayal is a cooperative exploration game with a defector. Everyone plays a character exploring a procedurally generated spooky mansion. When the players trigger an event called the Haunt, things get really interesting. One player becomes a traitor and has to kill everybody and/or complete an objective to win. There might also be werewolves, zombies, Dracula and other horrors depending on which of the fifty Haunts you trigger. The remaining explorers must complete an objective and/or kill the traitor to win.
We’ve played through about twenty scenarios, including a few from the expansion pack. Recently I cheated and read through every scenario in the Traitor’s Tome because there was one haunt I really wanted to play but hadn’t seen yet; a Balls-out, zombie-killing spree.
While there are two zombie scenarios, neither really captures the splatter camp of films like The Evil Dead. One involves you trapping the traitor’s undead family in their bedrooms while the other has you killing a zombie lord with a magic medallion. They’re very fun but I couldn’t leave well enough alone.
So I present to you, a work in progress:
Betrayal At The House On The Hill Haunt #21-A: The Night We Were Dead By Dawn
An alternate to haunt #21: House Of The Living Dead which is triggered if you find the Medallion in the Dining Room.
Your exploration is interrupted by the sounds of smashing glass and splintering timber. You hear screams. Then moaning. You look out the door. Rotting, shambling figures howl as they advance upon you. As you back away you trip over something. A weapon. You pick it up. You hear the moans from all over the house. You’ve gotta lock this place down before anymore dead people break in.
Scenario: You and the other Explorers are trapped in the house and surrounded by zombies. With every hour more zombies break into the house. Fortunately, every one of you is armed to the teeth. Your objective is to barricade every accessible door and window on the ground floor to stop the zombies from getting in. You have to survive until dawn.
Mechanics:
The player to the left of the haunt revealer goes first. Once every explorer has had a turn, the hour counter goes down by one, new zombies are spawned and current zombies move towards the players and make attacks.
Traitor: There is no traitor. Everyone must work together to survive until daybreak.
You Win If
- You seal all the doors and windows on the ground floor.
Or
- You survive until dawn (The hour counter reaches zero and someone is still alive).
You Lose If
Everyone gets killed by zombies.
Right Now
Place item tokens in any room that has a outside facing door or window. Go through the Item and Omen Decks and take the Revolver, Boomstick, Dynamite, Chainsaw, Blood Dagger, Axe, Spear and Sacrificial Dagger if they haven’t already been found. Divide these among the players.
Place x amount of zombies (any monster token) in the crypt and every ground floor room that has a outward facing window or door based on the number of entrances. These rooms are zombie spawn points. Keep all the monster tokens handy.
If there are no outward facing windows on the ground floor, the zombies spawn on any 2nd floor windows. Place the item tokens in those rooms.
Amount of Zombies spawned per number of windows and doors
1–2 entrances = 4 zombies per spawn point
3– 5 entrances = 3 zombies per spawn point
5–7 entrances = 2 zombies per spawn point
7+ entrances = 1 zombie per spawn point
Groovy…: Divide all of the aforementioned weapons among the explorers. Everyone needs at least one weapon. The Boomstick has unlimited ammo (You found a box of shells). If a character has two weapons, that character may dual wield and make two attacks per turn (Even if an aforementioned weapon is two-handed). You cannot stack weapon stats (If you have the chainsaw and axe, use each weapon’s rules separately for each attack).
Hours till dawn: The Omen counter is now an Hour Counter showing how many hours is left until daylight. After every player has had a turn, drop the haunt counter by one (If it was at 8 omens after every player has had one turn, it goes down to 7). Keep doing this until every window, door and the crypt is blocked or everyone is dead. Someone is still alive when you reach zero, you win.
Batten down the hatches: If an Explorer is in a room with a window, they can seal the window or door. The player makes a knowledge roll. On 4+, the window/door is sealed and no more zombies can enter through it. Cover the entrance with the item token. If all the ground floor doors and windows are sealed, the survivors win.
They Will Not Stop: Every time the Hour Counter goes down, more zombies are added to the board. Add x amount of zombie tokens (Any monster token) to every unblocked door and window in the house. This is also the zombie movement phase. Move any zombies towards the closest Explorers in the house. Zombies also attack during this phase.
Zombies
Speed 2
Might 4
Sanity 2
- Zombies always move towards the nearest explorers in the house
- Reducing any zombie’s stats to zero kills it. Remove the monster token from the game (There’ll be plenty more)
- The player to the Explorer’s left makes any attack rolls for any zombies attacking that explorer unless someone is already a zombie
- If an explorer dies, they become a zombie. They drop any weapons or items. This player (and any other players who die) now moves and rolls dice for any zombies on the board
- Zombies cannot use items or the magic elevator
Slow Them Down!: On their turn, a survivor may use one movement to move any furniture or debris in the way of any zombies. Place a character marker on that door to denote debris. Zombies must use one movement to climb over the debris. Debris does not block the line of sight for guns. Explorers are not affected by debris and move normally.
Medallion of Bad-ass: You look at the medallion closely. Engraved on its surface is a man with an enormous chin. He smirks as if he believes in you. You’re not going to let this ruin your day. Hail to the King baby.
In addition to its usual effects, the Medallion allows the Explorer wielding it to make one more attack for every zombie the Explorer kills on their turn (in addition a dual wielded weapon). There is no limit to the number of extra attacks you get as long as you have killed a zombie.
If you win: Daylight. This is a slaughterhouse. The air is thick with the smell of stale blood. There’s a crash at the door. Still twitchy, you raise your weapon. The door falls off its hinges. An unknown man stands there. He holds a sawn-off shotgun in one hand, the other arm ends in a chainsaw. .
‘Groovy.’
You follow him out of the house. In the distance, you hear that eerie collective moan.
‘Ready?’ he asks you.
You nod, hold up your weapon and follow your new best friend into battle.
If you lose: There is no escape. The army of the dead advances upon you. Any terror you felt has been replaced with a kind of ease. Hell, at least you’re not dying some boring death. They’re coming. You raise your weapon.
‘Come get some,’ you snarl as the horde surrounds you.
How did it go?
Not bad. It had some kinks but aside from the endless unkillable zombies, it went well. I played with my fiance and her friend, who agreed to indulge me. We played a normal game of Betrayal up until the haunt started, at which point I swapped out the trigger omen for the Medallion. They read through my directions, mostly understood everything. We got to work as zombies started flooding the house.
If you’ve played Betrayal, you know that the dice only go up to 2. There are two sides for 1 and the other two sides are zero. This is a very clever way to keep the players on their toes. Any dice roll has a chance of going right to hell. Unfortunately for my new haunt, killing a rapidly re-spawning army of zombies became very hard. This mission is about co-operation and power play. I wanted the players to go from the apprehension of exploring the house to the excitement of a shooting gallery. I quickly brought on a new rule: Zombies die after one successful combat role. This balanced out combat pretty well. A player could clear out several zombies in a turn while still having to take several attacks. One thing that was tedious was having to make, in one case, dozens of attacks rolls when it was the zombie turn.
There was a fun dynamic where the players were bouncing around the board, one player holding off the undead while the others try to block all the entrances. In the end, we did a pretty good job; blocking all but 2 entrances. By that point, we were almost out of monster tokens to represent new zombies and two of us had died. In the end, our friend Ella survived the countdown by hiding in the mystic elevator.
Post-mortem
I believe ‘The Night We Were Dead By Dawn’ succeeded in my goal of creating an experience that follows up Betrayal’s apprehensive first phase with an action-packed second phase. However due the game’s randomly generated board, balance is a nightmare. We had a pretty good house with enough entrances to feel like a challenge. Anymore and it would’ve been impossible. I know Betrayal is more about the experience than winning, but this is a scenario where there should be a fighting chance. Some players will absolutely get hosed by what room tiles turn up. Likewise, if there’s next to no ground floor entrances or windows, this mission turns into a cake walk.
The hastily introduced ‘One Hit’ zombie kill made the game way more balanced. Without it, the haunt would’ve ended a lot faster. There was something oddly satisfying about wiping out a whole room of zombies. but even then, there were many instances of an explorer being stranded in a room and about to take twelve Might 4 attacks. Some of the zombie turns got very tedious. We decided that extra zombie over 4 added +1 Might up to a total of 8. Next time, I’ll nerf the zombie Might stat and use the above to make the zombie attack phase faster.
Our friend hiding in the Mystic Elevator was a funny resolution to what was becoming a tense climax. This happened with only two hours left to dawn. With all the other players dead, she bolted to the mystic elevator and hopped between the basement and upper floor. The zombie movement speed of 2 meant there was little chance they’d catch her. It might be worth making a rule that stops people exploiting the elevator, but sometimes breaking Betrayal is part of the fun.
Not a disaster, so I’m calling it a win
Designing this campaign was a lot of fun and I’m shocked by how not broken it was. Most important of all, my fiance and her friend seemed to enjoy it. I’m sure with the above tweaks, this could be a very fun experience, even if there’s no accounting for how the house layout will affect play. Game design is fun but I won’t quit my day job just yet.
