With Halloween approaching the perfect board game to go along with the spooky but cliched movies on cable TV is “Betrayal at House on the Hill.” If you have a copy, break it out and give it a play. If you don’t, then hope that Avalon Hill re-releases the title sometime in the near future. It’s currently out of print.

The game centers on you and your fellow players slowly splitting up (of course) and exploring a very large and strange house. You may find weapons or people or supernatural strangeness, but eventually the ‘haunt’ will start. This is when one of the players is assigned to be the traitor and the rest of the players work to stop his evil plan.

The atmosphere of the game is pretty good and the stories recreate cheesy cable horror movies very well. There are fifty scenarios that randomly get played, each with its own story and goals. This ends up being the main problem with the game. There are so many scenarios with different rules and special circumstances that it seems that many of them were not play tested enough. We were constantly trying to figure out how to make the rules work for certain scenarios. Also, some scenarios are weighted to one side or the other. Some make the job of the heroes very difficult while others make the traitor’s goal almost impossible.

Still it’s a fun game for a medium size group that only takes 30-60 minutes to play each game.