Betrayal Legacy – Campaign 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 the entire campaign, which is designed to give you a feel for the game, whilst containing no spoilers. It assumes you are familiar with Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Hanging Tree Card

Looking Back on the Campaign

My game group played the last 2 games of Betrayal Legacy last week, and wrapped up what has probably been my favourite experience of the 4 Legacy games we have played. The campaign ends with a very satisfying conclusion, and the individual game plays didn’t suffer from the fatigue of repetition; partly due to the incremental building of the decks & tile stacks, and the introduction of the new mechanics throughout the campaign.

Mostly, though, the games in the campaign stayed fresh, due to the nature of the original, which is a game of 50 totally different endings, depending on which Haunt gets activated, coupled with the variability of a different player at the table becoming the Traitor. These mechanics from the original, made it a great choice to be turned into a campaign of 14 games.

The Legacy Elements

A good Legacy campaign starts slowly, then introduces new elements and mechanics, especially over the course of the early games. Charterstone and SeaFall were original games, and they started off simple, introducing complexity along the way. Pandemic Season 1, started with the full version of the original, and then added twists, and the campaign story on top. Rob Daviau does something new with Betrayal Legacy.

He starts you with a pared down version of the game compared to the original, (8 rooms instead of 44, and 11 Events instead of 45) and over the course of the campaign, it grows organically into a customised finished version, while adding new mechanics and features. He achieved this by providing a story for 33 of the 51 haunts that exist, to give some background for the Omens, Items and Events in the original game. This can be especially satisfying if you have favourite elements in Betrayal at House on the Hill, and you come across them in the campaign.

Jonah’s Turn

Jonah's Turn Card

“I want all the turns” is one of my favourite lines in the original game, and it is something oft quoted by my family whilst playing. But it was just a throw away line from a bully until we triggered the Haunt that includes the character of Jonah during the campaign. Now I know his backstory, which has made the playing of his card a bit more fun. And most of the other Event cards in the campaign, evoke the experience of the haunt where they originated.

After the Campaigns Conclusion

End of Game Card

At the end of the campaign, there was quite a bit of housekeeping to ready the game for Free Play. Cards and tiles were changed, final cards were added from the Purgatory deck, and other cards, some of which had been in play since the Prologue game, were removed from the game for good.

The rest of the Purgatory deck, not used in our campaign, was destroyed, along with the remaining unused legacy components, and the bleak journal that had been narrating our story. What remains is our own fully formed version of Betrayal with plenty of new Haunts still to explore. The Rooms, Omens, Items and Events in our version, tell the story of our campaign, through nearly 350 years of history, of our House on the Hill.

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