Scooby Don't - A Scooby Doo: Betrayal at Mystery Mansion Review

Is this too harsh to begin a review of a...

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A friend of mine picked this up after playing Betrayal at my house. I have never heard if he has played it yet. Sounds like some proof-reading went awry.

hotseatgames wrote: A friend of mine picked this up after playing Betrayal at my house. I have never heard if he has played it yet. Sounds like some proof-reading went awry.

I appreciate your diplomatic wording. Serious question: Do you prep before a game of Betrayal, making sure you select a good, clear haunt? When the haunt is revealed, is it a seamless 5 minutes of transition or is it 15 mins of questions and rule "debates"? How many times does it end with "I'm not even sure we played it correctly?" I WANT Betrayal to run smoothly (As the copies still on my shelf can attest), so when another version replicated almost every negative issue AGAIN, my goodwill toward it is exhausted.

I'd stayed away from this game for similar reasons, even though (1) the theme is broadly appealing and (2) the theme seems like a better fit to the mechanics than the standard version. But it sounds like they just broke it, or finished breaking the design, by poor implementation, something that's, erm, haunted the game series since the beginning.

I feel kind of the same way about Betrayal as I did about D&D 3/3.5 stat blocks, which even the professional authors often couldn't get right. If your game is that messy, maybe the problem is the design.

Velma is in the closet? Jinkies!

I haven't tried this version of Betrayal, but I've played the original a lot and the D&D one once. I disagree with a lot of the typical criticism of the original. The exploration half of the game is not a waste of time, it's the good part of the game, because it reliably offers a certain entertainment value for the kind of player who likes to explore. The wild variability of the game made the second half of the game difficult to playtest, though they should have had a ruthless editor to grind each scenario down to a flavor paragraph and some simple rules for the scenario. The Underground Lake doesn't need to be a basement title because the artwork depicts that the lake is some distance below the doors to that space.

The real problem with Betrayal is the unreliable entertainment value of the second half of the game. Certain scenarios become unbalanced if the house is too big or too small or if there is a bottleneck in the layout. When a scenario becomes unbalanced, one side or the other wins quickly enough that both winners and losers feel that the ending was anti-climactic.

Shellhead wrote: I disagree with a lot of the typical criticism of the original. The exploration half of the game is not a waste of time, it's the good part of the game, because it reliably offers a certain entertainment value for the kind of player who likes to explore.

I totally agree with this. Which is what makes the "You can pick a player to be the bad guy before the game starts" portion of this not really satisfying. Because that player goes through the motions of exploring, knowing full well that once the Haunt starts, any items they accumulated are simply just locked away along with their character. It works much better if it is a random player who is the "betrayer" but if this is the solution to players not wanting to be the betrayer, it's lack-luster. (I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think this is it.)

Betrayal has been a perennial favorite in my household and game group for 17 years. We approach it like an RPG funnel, a random story generator—sometimes the story is a back-and-forth nailbiter... and sometimes it's a slaughter. Either way we're entertained, and it's never been the same game twice.

WadeMonnig wrote:

hotseatgames wrote: A friend of mine picked this up after playing Betrayal at my house. I have never heard if he has played it yet. Sounds like some proof-reading went awry.

I appreciate your diplomatic wording. Serious question: Do you prep before a game of Betrayal, making sure you select a good, clear haunt?

No, we don't prep it, although I think one time we fudged it to avoid a repeat. A long, LONG time ago, Betrayal was one of my favorite games. When it hits, it really hits. But it doesn't take too many bungled haunts to really sour you on it. It pretty much only comes down off the shelf now at Halloween, and everyone involved knows what they are signed up for; maybe something supremely memorable, maybe something we all want to forget.

For all of its warts, Betrayal is one of the few games with sessions I can still recall. People wanting a serious game definitely need not apply. One person in my group is a diehard Betrayal lover, and has the Legacy version, which we have never tried. I have heard it is really great, and would like to check it out. Unfortunately the group doesn't have a lot of players and we don't meet often enough to really make a legacy game work.

It's also my hope that my KS version of the Gothic Game shows up prior to Halloween so that I don't have to play Betrayal again this year.

hotseatgames wrote: For all of its warts, Betrayal is one of the few games with sessions I can still recall.

From our most recent game:

Haunt 75.

It's not looking good for our heroes; the haunted part of the haunted house is cranked up to 11 and the traitor is cackling in the chaos—when he suddenly remembers he has the Dark Dice. And why shouldn't he roll them, in this, his moment of triumph? He rattles dem bones and they leave his fist, clattering along the baseboards...

...and come up full goose egg—a big, fat 0.

His stats drain to toddler-level, we converge on his position and stomp a mud hole in him.

I just got an email from Hasbro Pulse regarding the 3rd Edition of Betrayal at the House on the Hill. They are changing how the haunt will be generated. Essentially, giving the investigators scenarios cards that gives the reason to go into the house and which of the fifty haunts you'll play. I took one look at it and said hard pass. They're still using the cardboard shredding pegs and they're providing unpainted minis "so you can be creative and PAINT THEM YOUR WAY!!!" *eyeroll*