It's called "betrayal" for a reason
Yesterday was game day at work—at least for our team. Just one of the benefits in working for a game company: sometimes you spend your afternoon around a table, surrounded by cards, dice, and in today’s offsite, legos. (If you’ve never played Creationary, I highly recommend it. Think Pictionary, with legos. And who doesn’t need an excuse to play with those?)
This game day, we also ran through the 1978 version of Family Feud (and yes, it was awesome), followed by Betrayal at House on the Hill (appropriate for Halloween), and the very obscure Wiz War (where competing wizards throw spells at one another in an effort to steal each other’s hidden treasure). Fun times—Card Kingdom in Ballard has an excellent space for gaming events.
Playing through these, it was evident (in fact, outright stating the obvious) how most games we all play are either direct competition (you against everyone else: Wiz War), or team competition (your team against an opposing team: Family Feud).
Betrayal at House on the Hill takes a slightly different approach. Players start out cooperatively, exploring a haunted house room by room and discovering events, omens, and items as they go. Then at a certain random point, one of the players suddenly becomes “it.” Their task is now to hunt down the other players. Hence, the betrayal.
It’s a brilliant game, in part because of its replayability. The house is composed of room tiles drawn from a deck, so that the gameboard, in effect, is different every time. There are also dozens of scenarios, so when the one player becomes “it,” this might mean revealing themselves to be a vampire, werewolf, axe murderer—or in today’s game, a demonically creepy girl who wants you to stay and play with her forever. And ever.
Likewise for the players, depending on the threat, they have different conditions they need to meet in order to win. Defeat the monster, for example, or in today’s game, find a rowboat and escape the house before it sinks away into the swamp.
What strikes me about the game is also the concept of “it.” It’s not odd that players are competing against each other. But rather, that one of them is now very clearly in the role of villain (and not just competitor). I’m trying to think of other games that have a clear villain, but none come to mind. (Even games as simple as hide-and-go-seek. Is the seeker really the villain? I’d say he’s just the seeker—and usually, a terrified one at that).
So—are there any games where a players is in the role of the villain?
I think you should ask your cat. Then again, it’s not a game for her.
I’m totally jealous you played Family Feud. That was one of my favorite game shows!
It’s not terribly uncommon, primarily in dungeon crawling/adventure board games in fact. HeroQuest, Descent, Mansions of Madness, and a number of other dungeon crawlers are clearly inspired by D&D but set the DM character up as the villain who has to play by a set of rules while trying to kill the other players and win the game. There’s also games where the players are trying to track down one player on unequal terms (Scotland Yard and Letters from Whitechapel) and games where there’s a hidden villain or team of them (Shadows Over Camelot has a hidden traitor, and Battlestar Galactica has those villainous Cylons lurking somewhere that show up throughout the game.)
One of my favorites though is the cooperative Lord of the Rings game, which can add someone to play Sauron with an expansion, and you don’t get much more villainous than him. That expansion was part of the inspiration for the expansion to my game Get Bit, where someone plays the shark that’s trying to eat everyone.
There is a great game called Scotland Yard where one player is the notorious “Mr. X” and all the other players are members of Scotland Yard and are trying to hunt down Mr. X. The game is played on a map of London and each player is given a number of tokens for the public transport systems. Each turn they make a move on one system or another to try and land on the same square as Mr X, thereby capturing him. Mr X also has move tokens, but his player piece is invisible! Every so many turns Mr X must reveal where he is,otherwise he simply writes down his moves on a piece of paper that is only shown if his victory is challenged. However, the other players can see which tokens he plays (I can’t remember if they see all of them or only certain ones) and so they will know that he just took a bus or the tube. If he isn’t caught before Scotland yard runs out of travel points, the villain wins!
This is a great game to play with four people, and Mr X usually wins. Incidentally, this game played a key role in the courtship of myself and my husband. I was Mr X. I won.
[...] Betrayal at Game Day [...]
[...] the mansion (with a basement level, or the like), randomizing rooms in the house (in the style of Betrayal on House on the Hill), having a second murder target, or a detective that tries to catch the murderers. There’s [...]