Betrayal Legacy Board Game

I feel like my fiction blog has mostly transformed into my gaming blog rather than using gaming content to fill in between my writing posts, and even then, I haven't been good about putting up posts every week. Part of this was due to my second round of cancer last year and the shingles kicker earlier this year, but ever since my shingles episode my energy has been low so there have been more times than I've liked where I just decided it was easier not to post. (I need to run through another big otome game, lol. Those give me content for weeks.)

Don't worry, I'm still seeing all my doctors regularly, so I hope to have more energy again soon.

So this week, I'm going to talk about Betrayal Legacy, which is one of a growing number of board games that play out over an extended number of gaming sessions. Each group of players will have the story play out differently for them based on who wins and who loses.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is the original base game featuring a bunch of premade characters who will explore an old house. It's been around since 2004, and the players take turns moving from room to room, uncovering spooky things, until eventually enough ill omens have been unturned that the "haunt" is revealed.

The fun thing about the original Betrayal is that you have no idea what's going to happen when you start. Based on the omen drawn and the room the player is standing in, you flip through a book to the appropriate entry and it tells you what happens. One player is usually turned traitor (it's usually but not always the haunt revealer) and sent from the room to read one set of instructions while the rest of the players read another. When both parties are done, the game resumes with the main party and the traitor each trying to fulfill their objectives. A few scenarios might not have a traitor at all.

Since you never know what you're going to get, there's a lot of replayability, and I've played this version of the game with several different groups of people without ever getting a repeat.

Betrayal Legacy is the campaign version of Betrayal at House on the Hill. You still start out with a house, but it's not creepy yet. Each player picks one of five families to play, and my group had four fairly static players who were there for most sessions, and the fifth family was shared by a fifth and sixth player who were never there at the same time.

We started this game as something to do in between our D&D sessions if we didn't have our full group present for important story points or the DM needed a break, and while I don't remember the exact date we started, I would hazard a guess that we began in 2018, because we had already been playing for a while before we wrapped up our D&D campaign in 2019. (And I know that date, because when Covid forced us into isolation in March 2020 we all were like "Thank, God we finished that campaign!" Which sounds kinda funny, but it'd been running longer than any of us thought it would and our last few sessions had already been hard to schedule.)

So Betrayal Legacy didn't start up again until late 2021, after people started getting vaccinated and I could be reasonably safe coming out of the house (because, you know, immunocompromised).

Still, it's a fun game. Each session at its most basic level plays out like Betrayal at House on the Hill, except that sometimes you might start somewhere other than the ground floor hallway. You then explore the house until enough omens have been triggered for the haunt to start and someone (usually) ends up being designated the traitor and presumed to be working for nefarious purposes. In one scenario my group had though, they were pretty sure the traitor was actually the good guy and everyone else was doing something bad. This was more or less confirmed by the scenario immediately after it, which was a nice twist.

However, unlike the base game, things that happen can affect the house. There are ghosts haunting certain rooms, and open spaces for new ghosts to be added if someone dies there. Though dying sucks a bit since it leaves you out of play and passively witnessing the rest of the conflict (unless you're the traitor, in which case you may have minions to move), it is fun adding a sticker to permanently mark on the gameboard where your character ate it.

Different conclusions to the scenario are read depending on the result, whether the traitor wins/loses, or if the party wins/loses in the traitorless scenarios, and in turn, those results affect future iterations of the game. We physically destroyed room tiles because something happened in them that according to the story rendered them forever unusable, and replaced them with other rooms according to the story. Some event cards, random things that could happen throughout the game, could be destroyed before ever being put into play because they were simply "not part of our story."

And yet, the final scenario felt rather pre-ordained. I won't spoil the particulars, but despite all the this is/isn't part of your story, I don't think the final scenario would have been all that different if we had done drastically different things. I haven't read how other people's games turned out, but it felt like who won/lost all our previous sessions didn't really matter, and being a writer I had hoped for a more personalized narrative build up.

In retrospect this may not have been possible, or difficult to implement, but it still felt like a missed opportunity. I was not the game owner for our sessions so I don't have the box to reference, but there was essentially a story deck we'd go through to start off each scenario, and things would occasionally be taken out of it as directed by the game. Since the story deck is pretty static, the final scenario is likely the same for everyone. It's just the set dressing might be different.

Though it took us about four years to finish, we're pretty happy that we did, and we only really had one complaint about the final scenario and it involved a particular game mechanic we collectively didn't like. Since we didn't like it, we avoided engaging with it unless we absolutely had to. In the final session it turned out that if we'd regularly been using it, we would have gotten a massive bonus towards the final showdown. Instead the final session turned into a weird slog where four of us were dead (including the traitor) and our last player spent several turns engaging with this mechanic solo while everyone else watched. And then he died in an anti-climatic fashion unique to this mechanic and that was it. The traitor won.

Still, it was overall a good experience, and even though the campaign is over, my friend the game owner started going through the rules and apparently the fun can continue. We jointly decided to permanantly transform a particular room tile into a different version of itself by placing a massive sticker on it, and apparently we can still heirloom items (a nifty way to mark something as having been in your family for generations).

One last thing I want to mention is the helm. In Betrayal Legacy you're given this disc called the helm and once per game session you're allowed to fill up a crest slot on the helm with your family crest in order to get a free reroll of the die. Obviously this is very nice when you're in a tight spot and about to die, but at the same time... you're pretty sure you shouldn't be doing this. Nothing comes for free, especially in a game like this one.

Despite that, the game encourages you to worship the helm and find your own way of revering it as it's lifted out of the game box each session. The helm is only ever to be handled by two hands, never one. That kind of stuff.

Well, I'm quite happy that I disrespected the helm. And while it likely will never come into play again, I'm tickled that there is now a physical reminder of my disrepect that will remain forevermore.

VN Talk: Yrsa Major: An Elchemia Story

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on Mac, Linux, and Browser)
Release: 2021

Yrsa Major has been in my indie gaming backlog since it came out last year, largely because of its protagonist, Yrsa. She's a tall, broad-shouldered woman, who we're introduced to when she kills a daimon with a shovel in front of a bunch of quaking guards with actual weapons. On top of that, she's the "unimaginable" age of thirty, which is quite old for a female romantic lead, especially in otome.

Though we've had female protagonists before who are capable of handling themselves in the midst of combat, Yrsa is a bit unusual in that despite her size, she's not defined as a warrior. She's a carpenter who just happens to be good at killing monsters if push comes to shove. And not being defined by her strength and her appearance is very much what Yrsa Major is about, even though Yrsa herself is initially unaware of it.

Shortly after Yrsa's daimon slaying introduction, we get to see her in a tavern in the nearby town where people seem to be celebrating her victory, but she's spending most of her time arm-wrestling the men who want to challenge her. We quickly realize something is off when a drunkard challenges her and begins to tell her of all the sweet things he'll do for her when he wins, only for her to quickly defeat him without breaking a sweat. She then leaves as a bard begins to strike up an old song about a man who married a bear in a time when women were literally bears.

Yrsa doesn't complain or show that she's upset in any way, which tells us a lot about her.