I played a priest, and had a chainsaw. It was all going well until a little girl shot me in the face.

A little over two years ago, I visited the offices of Obsidian Entertainment. I was given a tour and a chance to talk to some of the developers there, people who had created some of the best RPGs in PC history (including Fallout, Planescape: Torment, and Baldur's Gate, among others).

Obsidian seems like a really fun place to work, for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is the fact that their meeting room is stuffed from floor to ceiling with a wall of board games, which the team plays regularly.



I asked several people at Obsidian which of the board games, out of the hundreds to choose from, was their favorite.

Every person I asked said Betrayal at House on the Hill.

Betrayal has been a cult classic among board games fans for more than a decade now, winning fans thanks to its atmospheric haunted house gameplay and unique end game, which sees a team of explorers suddenly split by betrayal. The original game features 50 different "haunts," which cause the game to mutate and evolve in different and surprising ways. In one game you may be facing off against a vampire, while in another one of your former friends will be attempting to blow the entire house to pieces while you struggle to stop him.

At PAX East 2016, I had a chance to play a game of Betrayal's new expansion, Widow's Walk. The expansion adds a number of new gameplay features and cards, along with 50 new haunts created by well-known writers, game designers, and gaming celebrities. Though I've only seen a small portion of what the expansion has to offer, it's already clear that it will be a no-brainer purchase for fans of the original game.

Spoiler warning: I won't discuss the content of any of the new haunts until the final section of this article, under the "Get a Clue and other new Haunts" heading.

Welcome to Widow's Walk

Aside from the new haunts (which are obviously the big selling point for the expansion, since Betrayal is always best when you haven't played the end game haunt before), Widow's Walk comes with 20 new room tiles (which include the new roof floor), 30 new cards (11 items, 11 events, and 8 omens), and 78 new tokens to add to the massive collection that already comes with the base game. Nothing about the expansion looks to do anything to address accusations of "fiddlyness" from those who just aren't fans of the original game; though Widow's Walk improves a few elements, Betrayal will remain very much a love it or hate it experience, depending on your tolerance for its style and mechanics.

The most useful of the new tokens are what are called "explorer tokens," which are simply tokens with explorer faces on them that you can use to track visits to rooms that grant bonuses the first time you enter them, or which can be used in a variety of ways during haunts.

A number of the new room tiles include dumbwaiter icons, which allow explorers to move from the rooms to different landings in the house. This came in handy during the game I played at PAX, and it's clear this feature was added to the game to allow for a bit more flexibility and unpredictability regarding how players can move through the house.

Other new rooms of note include a spiral staircase (another way to connect various levels of the house) and a bathroom, which designer Mike Selinker (who was the lead developer on the original Betrayal) said finally allowed him to address one of the most common questions he gets: "Why doesn't this house have a bathroom?"

The new event, item, and omen cards looked to add a lot of fun to the game (we had the deck stacked so we would get a chance to see a lot of these). Among the highlights:

An event card called "What year is it?" in which a mysterious flash-forward by an explorer requires the other side to read their haunt flavor text out loud (potentially revealing clues about victory conditions).

A "possessed hand" event which gives an explorer the choice of cutting off their hand or replacing it with an item (hello Evil Dead ).

). A camcorder containing footage of the final moments of previous visitors to the house, which can be passed around to give buffs to the knowledge stat.

A "letter" omen, which can be used to transport a player to another player's location.

A black cat companion which will give you bonuses to rolls two thirds of the time, but penalties the other third of the time.

A "chainsaw" weapon, which just rules.

Get a Clue and other new Haunts

Stop reading now if you want the new haunts in Widow's Walk to be complete surprises for you!

The haunt we played at PAX was titled "Get a Clue," and was designed by Elisa Teague, designer of the game Geek Out! This haunt does a great job of underscoring the flexibility and unpredictability of Betrayal, as we suddenly found ourselves playing a game very much like the classic board game Clue. As the heroes we all took on new names corresponding to our explorer colors, and gathered together in the dining room. The traitor, meanwhile, became the butler of the house, who had just committed a grisly murder of the house's master. The fact that the traitor was in this case a young girl (controlled by game designer Mike Selinker), felt perfectly in keeping with the type of madness Betrayal games always seem to deliver.

As heroes our task was to explore the house to find several key rooms (corresponding to rooms in Clue) and then make knowledge roles to establish alibis in those rooms. We needed to be carrying special item tokens (representing Clue weapons) in order to establish those alibis, which were vulnerable to theft by the murderous traitor.

We were in a race against time as we heard sirens approaching and the game timer kept ticking up on the traitor's turns. As Father Rhinehardt I was able to establish my alibi right away, and spent the rest of the time helping the others to try to locate the other key rooms. I felt safe from attack by the traitor, thanks to the chainsaw I had picked up, but in a quick sequence of events the murderous little girl found a gun and took aim at my character from several rooms away...

And then it was all over. I was dead, the police arrived, and we had just barely failed to establish our alibis.

We were told to expect a wide variety fo haunts in the expansion, as you would expect given the diversity of designers. The haunt from Pendleton Ward (the creator of Adventure Time), for example, is appropriately funny and goofy, while others are a lot more grim. The designer of Risk Legacy Rob Daviau (who was also instrumental in the original creation of Betrayal) joined us to watch the latter half of our game at PAX, and we were told that his haunt (called "In the Details") involves accidentally selling your soul. A haunt themed around the movie Inception was also mentioned.

Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk will be available October 14. You'll need the base game to play the expansion, so pick it up now if you don't already have it.