So now that I have wheels again, I ended the gaming drought both days this weekend. I got out to Mt. Prospect Saturday. Of note was Betrayal at House on the Hill, the new Avalon Hill game, and only the second truly "new" game published under the AH imprint since Hasbro took it over. In this game you and other players are laying tiles to explore a haunted house, quasi-cooperatively (because you don't have an objective yet). At some point, an event will be triggered which will turn one player against the rest. In this game, my character was an 8-year-old girl. I encountered a madman who killed me, at which point I assumed the madman character, controlling zombies who tried to kill the rest of the characters. My undead minions made short work of them to win, but my madman got killed along the way. Surprisingly neither side's victory condition had anything to do with his survival.



Pretty decent game, all in all. It reminded me of the Buffy game in its 1 vs. multiple-players system. I don't know if it's $40 worth of decent, though, but I don't know that anything's $40 worth of decent with the big ticket items as of late.



This being the campaign season, on Sunday I played Road to the White House with a co-worker and some of his gaming buddies. Everyone plays a politician loosely based on real people and/or archetypes, and spends 6 months on the campaign trail trying to win electoral votes. My candidate was a grizzled-yet-respected Senator from Idaho who started off with virtually no base or cash, but has high charisma and a surrogate campaigner who sticks around for 4/5 of the game. My strong issues were Housing, Education and Abortion (pro-life), the latter of which came up three times in the game, which got me two more long-lasting surrogates and locks in Alabama and Utah. Because of this constant support and some Education dollars coming in, the other players were convinced I was in the lead, but I ended up going the way of Howard Dean. I ended up getting 72 electoral votes (including NY) to survive the first ballot, and was second-or third-place in many states, but they weren't the states that went back in play after the first player was eliminated, so I was next to go. I don't remember who the winning canddiate was, but he was in a final slugfest with the Ted Turner doppelganger who got 50% discounts on dirty tricks. Despite this game coming in at seven hours (six players, four rookies including myself), everyone seemed to agree that it was worth playing again soon, and that experience would shave at least two hours off the time.