Betrayal Legacy – Game 1 Review

This is one in a series of posts regarding the board game Betrayal Legacy. You can access all my other Betrayal posts HERE. This post is a review of Game 1, which is designed to give you a feel for the game, whilst containing no spoilers.

Building the Game

The Prologue game was so quick, that we went straight into Game 1, and I’m sure this will be similar for a lot of players, particularly those that have played Betrayal at House on the Hill before. We reset everything to setup, making sure to reread steps 1-7 to not miss anything, and then the winner of the Prologue, me as it happens, turned over the top card of the Legacy Deck.

Chapter 1 - 1694

It reiterated some instructions, and then walked us through the next part of the story, before giving us some new set up to do. We added some room tiles and event and item cards, to build the tile stacks and those decks. In the “28 years between games”, the homestead has expanded, some important items have been added, and some more creepy events have been discovered.

A new mechanic was also introduced at this point, which is on theme, and makes this version a fresh approach to the original game. The other fun thing I noticed sprinkled throughout the game, is the flavour text found on some of the cards and the entries in the Bleak Journal. In the beginning they seemed to be throw away comments, but as the game progressed, they seemed like something we should be paying attention to.

Flavour Text

The Haunt

Game 1 has the first use of the Traitor’s Tome, with a revealed Traitor, and hidden information between the Heroes and the Traitor. The house was still pretty small, so it only took about 20 minutes to get to the Haunt. It was also the first indication of Haunts happening in the traditional way of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, with different Bleak Journal entries being read, depending on the haunt revealers location when the Haunt was triggered. The Purple player (who had chosen the family name Manson, after researching serial killers on the internet), was the Traitor this time around. He was one of the new players to Betrayal, and I could see he was reveling in having a hidden goal to try and achieve. After a pretty close game, the Heroes won, though not without suffering a casualty. All up, it was just over an hours play with 4 players.

End of Game

We read the “Heroes win” entry in the Bleak Journal, which added some more cards to Item and Event decks from the Purgatory Deck. We could truly start to see how different choices and outcomes in the campaign, were going to make our game different to other people who played it. The components added at the start of game play will expand the game in the same way for everyone, but the components added at the end of the game would be different depending on the Haunt, who was victorious, and other choices made by the players during the game. In the words of the Red player, “This feels a lot more like Charterstone, with the pulling out of the specific cards.” The Blue player added, “But with more children murdering people.”

The Fates of our Players
  • Green – Beth Griswold, now 42, Not the Traitor, Survived. “Winning”
  • Blue – Giovanni Costanza, 69, Not the Traitor, Survived. “Home Alone 5: Crazy Kids”
  • Red – Belle Monk, 19, Not the Traitor, Died. “Ravaged by a 7 year old”
  • Purple – Margaret Manson, 7, Traitor, Died. “Killed by an evil old man”

 

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