Betrayal At Baldur’s Gate Review

Betrayal At House On The Hill is and has been a cult classic among board games fans for more than a decade now, its atmospheric haunted house gameplay and unique endgame, which sees a team of explorers suddenly split by betrayal.

Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate is a re-themed version of the cult-favorite horror board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. As you can guess from the title, it’s set inside the Dungeons & Dragons city of Baldur’s Gate.

Contents:
• 1 set up box
• 1 rulebook
• 2 haunt books (Traitor’s Tome and Secrets of Survival)
• 42 tiles
• 1 Elfsong Tavern start tile
• 1 Catacomb Landing start tile
• 6 prepainted plastic adventurer figures
• 30 plastic clips
• 8 dice
• 1 Turn/Damage track
• 86 cards (45 events, 22 items, 13 omens, 6 player aid)
• 215 tokens (62 monster tokens, 54 adventurer power, event, haunt, item, obstacle tokens, 36 adventurer tokens, 18 NPC
• tokens, 18 quest tokens, 14 item and item pile tokens, 13 monster tokens)

Players, will adventurer exploring the streets of Baldur’s Gate, you will lay down tiles to build up the area. As you’re exploring, you will, collect items, find omens, and run into events that help form their story. At a certain point, the “haunt” will trigger and gameplay changes. One of your party is outed as being a traitor who is out to do something evil, and it’s up to the rest of the party to stop them!.

When laying out tiles during exploration, the game is divided into two levels. There is the street level, made up of building and street tiles, and the catacombs made up of catacomb tiles. This was a bit jarring to me, if you have played Betrayal At House On The Hill, you know you just have to house to explore, this felt a bit off at first, but after playing for a bit it was a very welcome change, you can move from catacombs to street level pretty easy if you wish. It added more of a “Dungeon Crawl” feel to the game.

Two booklets (one for the Traitor, one for the rest of the players) each contain the story, rules, and goals for fifty different scenarios. When the haunt is triggered the traitor player leaves the room and reads up on his or her new abilities and goals for the game while all the other players read about their goals and can strategize together. The two groups come back together and then work through the end game. Which is pretty much the same as House On Hill.

What’s New

Characters now have unique abilities.
Adding rooms to the house works slightly differently. Doors are color-coded, and when players explore a new room, they draw a tile from the stack of the corresponding color.
There are three tile colors, representing Buildings, Streets, and Catacombs, but the Building and Streets are placed on the same level of the board, meaning there are only two “floors” in Baldur’s Gate.
The Haunt roll mechanism now requires players to roll as many dice as total Omen cards drawn, instead of a flat six. The Haunt then triggers if the result of the roll is six or more. The new haunt roll mechanic also ensures that the haunt cannot happen prior to the 3rd Omen card.

Components

The core of the game are the cards omens, items, and encounters as well as the tiles that make up the streets, buildings, and catacombs of Baldur’s Gate. Have some great artwork, it’s similar to what they have they done in Dungeons & Dragons 5E books, which makes perfect sense, is this is set in the same universe.

The tokens and there are a metric ton of tokens, have art on them, well some of them do, a few them just have the word written on it, which I have had some artwork.

The text on the cards is very easy to read. Just the right size font.

The painted miniatures are a really nice touch, they are well made and painted nice. I was happy to see they were painted, it added to the immersion of the game, in my opinion, plus you can also use them in your tabletop game if you need more minis!

Final Thoughts

This is a fun take on Betrayal for sure, they did a great job of merging the two worlds, the dungeons & dragons theme is there, you can tell they designed this from the ground up to be a Dungeons & Dragons-themed game, and did not just “tack it on”

If you’re a fan of Betrayal, you will feel right at home here, with the few differences I talked about above. There is still the problem of some of the haunts being very vague and you are left scratching your head on some rules, but if you can overlook this, you will have a great time exploring Baldur’s Gate, gearing up and then having to take on one of your own party, as they betray the group. There is enough different from “Betrayal” to keep it interesting and makes it feel like a completely different game. there is a learning curve when it comes to hero selection and unique abilities

You can pick up a copy of Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate at your FLGS or via Amazon

A BIG THANK YOU to Avalon Hill/Wizards Of The Coast for providing us with the review copy, for this review. This had no effect on the outcome of the review.