when there's not even a board?
what. The concept of building a board with tiles was absolutely mind blowing to me. All my life, "The Board" was the defining characteristic of board games - an immutable world in which your character lives, navigates, eats, and poops. As a long time video gamer, Monopoly and other linear board games felt like the original NES Mario Brothers, a limited one dimensional world where you can go up, down, and forward.
You could imagine how confused I was when I started playing Betrayal. It was Super Mario 64, where we the players could move in any direction we wanted to. We were taken off the rails of the roller coaster, free to fly around. It was a completely open world for these random-ass explorers to chill in a giant, obviously haunted mansion (Why would a small Japanese child be hanging out with old priests and a professor? .... probably best not to answer that.)
Oh, also, it was Mario 64 where the land was different EVERY TIME you booted up the game. Fuckin neat-o.
The concept of a randomly-generated board game was so unique to me. One of my favorite genres of video games is the infamous roguelike (with Rogue Legacy and Crypt of the Necrodancer being two of my absolute favorites.) These games, with their brutal, uncompromising gameplay, do not encourage grinding for levels - they encourage getting better. The kicker: When you die (and you will die), the next playthrough will be a new procedurally generated dungeon. Sure, a handful of elements remain constant everytime you play. But the two most important elements of a game, the win condition (exit of the level) and loss condition (layout of the baddies) are both random.
And lets talk about the second half of the game. Some rooms of the mansion contain an Omen. The player revealing the omen room performs a haunt roll, and for each omen room on the table, the difficulty of the "Haunt roll" increases. When a character fails a haunt roll, someone is declared the betrayer via an arbitrary decision described in the rule book. Then, a random horror themed scenario takes place: A giant two headed worm trying to take over the house, a horde of cannibals running around being assholes, your friends eating all your girl scout cookies when you thought you had a whole nother box but you don't, etc.
Except for these, these suck, you can have them all.
Apparently, this is a board game concept called Tile Laying. The randomness introduced by playing tiles from a stack adds tremendous replay value, but also the possibility for shitty, unplayable situations. There's tons of room for random events to happen - you could, theoretically, fail the haunt roll on the first omen room. Basically, you get lured into a giant haunted house to get mauled by a werewolf immediately after entering the front fuckin door. On the other hand, the random tile placement could lead to unplayable situations. A hideous powerful spider queen trapped in the godforsaken basement with no way back up? GODDAMN TERRIFYING in real life, but boring in real game.
What things would we steal from this game??
Games need to be a combination of strategic skill and random luck. Dice rolls or card drawing add the replayability to keep a game fresh long after you tear off that obnoxious plastic wrap, but excessive random elements negate skill. The challenge we have to address is to develop a way to toe the line between a luck based game and a skill based game. This is where inordinate amounts of playtesting is going to pay off. However, a well designed amount of random elements will give losing players a chance to catch up, and the possibility for winning players to lose. Most importantly, randomness emulates real life.
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