“Betrayal Legacy” is a very thematic game of exploration designed on the very well known “Betrayal at House on the Hill” series. As in the original game, players take the roles of members of different families exploring an haunted house to retrieve treasures and long lost family heirlooms and to unravel the dark past of the house. With respect to the original game, however, Betrayal Legacy provide players with 13 scenarios plus 1 (a tutorial) that allow them to witness the story of the house unfolding from 1666 to 2004 (the year when Betrayal at House on the year was published). This aspect not only allow to add a very engaging narrative element to each of your game sections but it also makes sure that the actions from one episode will carry on to impact future games. For example, players can mark items as their family heirloom in a game just to obtain various bonuses if they randomly find the same item in a subsequent games. For example, they may find their great granddad book of memories  or their great-great-great grand aunt bucket and so on. At the same time, if a character dies in a room during an episode, their ghost may haunt the room an impact the events of future games. As you may have noticed, the game has a bit of a dark theme that should be considered when choosing it for a game night. I personally found the theme to be very well thought and balanced through all the story-telling aspects so that it never becomes too difficult to handle even for younger players but I do recommend to consider the age rating of 12+ when picking it up. Having said that, let’s dig a bit more in the game to see if this game may be up your dark alley.

What’s in the box and how do you play?

Betrayal Legacy is quite a big box packed with a lot of components of good quality. Among them there are countless cardboard tokens and tiles, a few dices and character markers, some miniatures, some player sheets, different rulebooks and sticker sheets and, most important, hundreds of cards. These are the key elements of the game as they provide all the details the players will need to go through all the 13 episodes of the campaign. They also provide all items, instructions and elements you need for your games allowing the game to growth from the first to the last scenario. Once the story fully unfolded, the story deck will be depleted but players will be left with a very personalized game that can be replayed indefinitely. In terms of gameplay, the core rules of the game are pretty straightforward and quite easy to learn. It all starts by laying down a few tiles to represent different rooms in each of the four areas of the House (ground floor, first floor, basement and outside). Players will then start taking turns to move their player miniature thought the house and to explore new rooms. Every time a new tile is placed, the icons on it may trigger an event, allowing the player to take extra actions or granting an item to the player. Some of these items are very special and they are called “Omens”. Finding an Omen may trigger a special event called the “Haunt” in which one of the players will have some nefarious special goal and will be designed as the “traitor”. All  the other players will either need to prevent the traitor to achieve their goal or they will have a different goal to achieve before the traitor does in order to win. All these events are very unique and the cards will provide all the information you need in order to play them. In addition, the cards will point all players to read some entries of the “Bleak Journal” to learn more about the event they are about to play while the Traitors and all other players will learn some details specific to their role in the “Traitor’s Tome” and in the “Secret of survival” books. There is a lot of story telling in this game!

Would this game be great for you?

Speaking for myself, I found Betrayal Legacy to be a great game. I loved playing the game and I have enjoyed in particular the legacy aspects of it. The combination of the cards in the Legacy Deck and the stories in each of the books provided such a great atmosphere that kept all of us chained to our chairs at each game. At the same time, the mechanics are easy and quite solid so each play was fast and very enjoyable with very little downtime that helped a lot in keeping the younger ones engaged throughout the campaign. Bonus points to the fact that the game can be actually played after the campaign completed without losing much of its perks. I think the main limit of this game is the strong element of luck and variability linked to the dice rolls and the card drawing. For example, I struggled a couple of times in a hunt as I haven’t found any weapon before the event started and sometime I felt the position of my character on the map may have put me at a disadvantage during the game. Overall, none of these occurences were too much frustrating and they were balanced by the fun of finding a way to beat the challenge. And boy how challenging some of the haunts were!