This weekend the roleplaying session had to be boardgame-related due to various players not being able to come, so we played the new edition of Betrayal at House on the hill, recently bought and barely opened but not yet tested :)
We had time to play two times (box says 1 hour long games, but it will probably take more around 1,5 or 2 hours, depending on the hunt), and so far so good.
The game feels fun and varied. The randomly generated floors of the house (upper level, ground level and basement, with some cards specific but many generic), the card decks for items, omens (more on this soon) and events and the 43 different hunts provide a lot of variety.
All the players start as detectives entering a house, exploring and revealing the rooms and corridors and grabbing items while events happen. From time to time, some rooms will make the current player grab an omen card, which represents unnatural events, and after each that player must roll 6 dice and the hunt might begin (or not yet).
When the hunt begins, a table indicates which of the 43 hunts will be. For example, in one we had an alien spaceship inside a room and aliens abducting the players (controlled by the player that started the hunt), while in other a deadly virus was released in the house and one of us started infected and tried to infect more people while the rest gathered ingredients to build a vaccine.
The "Lovecraftian-like" sanity attribute is here, with hunts covering from vampires to aliens, cthulhu like monsters, ghosts or demonic possesions.
The game is really funny, specially if the hunt includes a "hidden traitor" (the bad guy is random and nobody knows at first), but it is also quite hard: In both plays we all died and loose. The game requires very good teamwork and quite a lot of luck: if you fail an omen throw too soon, your chances of surviving are quite low.
While hard, you always feel as if you were living a terror movie, with really terrible monsters, magic elevators (that move around the house) and terrible happenings.
Definetly recommended buy.