Betrayal at House on the Hill

Ask the bgg thread

>>55199104
The rules of the haunt supersede the game rules, even ones written on the cards themselves. The haunt specifically tells you what to do with the girl.

From the traitor book.
>You lose the Girl and any bonuses from the Girl card. Put the Girl token (crimson) in any room on the same floor as the room where the haunt was and at least five tiles away from the Mummy. If no rooms are at least five tiles away, place her as far away as possible on that floor.
>Set aside the Girl card. When an explorer enters the same room as the Girl token, that player takes the Girl card.
>If you get the Girl, you can give her to the Mummy while you're in the same room. The Mummy then becomes the Girl's custodian.
And the survivors
>When a player's character enters the same room as the Girl token, that player takes the Girl card.

In short, the girl is a physical token on the board to be moved around. Her ownership changes whenever an explorer/player (not the mummy) enters the same room as her. Note that even when you are the traitor, you are still an explorer/player unless the game revokes this by removing your character from the board and making you play a token for a monster, group of monsters, a tree, or whatever. So, in other words, you are playing tug of war with a little girl as the rope. You didn't need to kill your friend to get her in your possession, but as murder is always the second way to victory anyway you may as well have. The mummy also has special rules to becoming custodian of the girl that are identical to the rules for stealing any other item.

I've had some of my best and worst ga.i g moments ever with this game. Sometimes it's a crazy 5 v 1 fight to the death with a bunch of cool interactions, but other times it's waiting 45 minutes for the haunt to start just for the Traitor to move two tiles and win the game. Anyone else feel this way?

>>55200304
Yep.
One haunt, the traitor has us all laughing with the positioning of his assassins, or we all suspect each other of being infected by an alien virus.
On the other end, sometimes a player just walks over to death and beats him at chess in a single round by sheer luck.

>>55199868
Ok thanks anon, I ended up losing anyway because they found the mummys name before I could kill everyone. Thanks for the reply

>>55200304
While BAHotH is a fun 'story telling' system, it isn't much of a balanced game system. Some of the haunts are notoriously easy for one side or the other to win.

>>55202173
Is there a way via houseruling to add luck manipulation or balance to the game? Like have some sort of way of generating fate points?

>>55202342
None that I'm aware of, mainly because the scenarios and their specific mechanics & win/lose conditions can vary greatly from one story to the next.

As a story telling tool for people who aren't expecting a balanced game, it's OK. It suffers from a lot of randomness prior to the start of the haunt, and then because of all the random elements (house map, artifacts found, player location at the start of the haunt, etc) the scenario can end up a cake-walk for one side or the other. So it's always sort of a 'crap-shoot' as to whether or not it'll be a tense story, or a one-sided steam-roll.

>>55200673
In the haunt where we were all suspecting each other of being infected, I once figured out who the traitor was at the start through process of elimination. The new guy was confused on what the benefits of inoculating other players would be while one rolled dice as if he was moving a monster out of habit.