Betrayal at House on the Hill vs Sheriff of Nottingham

Each of the 50 scenarios are unique and have a gripping story that helps pull you into the game. Whether it's demons, monsters, or rituals that need to be completed, each gameplay session will be filled with new stories and new objectives. Thanks to this, each session memorable in its own way as you won't ever be doing the same thing twice.

In the beginning, players all work together to explore and search the haunted house, but once the betrayers are revealed in the later sections, the game turns you against one another. This complete shift in tone from co-op exploration to frantic survival is often the most exciting part as everyone's goals suddenly change and your friends are trying to kill you.

The "Traitor's Tome" rulebook contains a base of 50 "haunt" scenarios to play through, but you can easily create your own or find more online if you'd like to play more unique or varied games. Even when playing the base game, the sheer amount of variety in nightmarish things (monsters, aliens, ghosts, weird portals) the game throws at you is incredible.

Overall, this is a great game to help get your friends into board games, even if they are bit reluctant. Each game session usually only lasts about 60 minutes, but manages to pack as much fun in as possible. The suspense of exploration combined with the excitement of the big reveal is an addicting mechanic that works well with many groups. Thanks to this short length and incredible way of drawing people in, this makes it a great game to pick up and play with friends on the spur of the moment.

You can play a whole game from start to finish in about an hour.

Perhaps one person, or even multiple people are forced to switch to Betrayers in the middle of the game. You never know who is going to be affected, what the revealed horror will be, or when it will happen. Additionally, the Betrayers and Investigators often have objectives which are kept secret from one another, so you never know what your opponent's win condition is until it happens. All of this keeps everyone guessing what's going to happen next and how things will play out.

The Window's Walk expansion not only adds 50 new haunts, but adds new rooms, cards and opens up the roof for exploration. Overall, it's an excellent addition that expands on the base game and gives you plenty of new content to enjoy.

“Sheriff of Nottingham” is a great game for providing some action and laughs at a smaller get-together, which is to be expected from an easy game that revolves around light roleplay, random banter, and lying and bribing your way to victory.

While not necessarily a roleplaying game, sometimes players can’t help but change their voice when taking on the role of the sheriff and threatening the merchants. The same principle works the other way around – merchants tend to come up with witty excuses when trying to bribe the sheriff or pass their stock as legitimate. All of this can lead to some hilarious and memorable moments.

"Sheriff of Nottingham" makes for a great gateway game because of how easy the rules are. Even children can understand the main gist quite easily. The game revolves around managing your hand, collecting sets, and lying straight to the sheriff's face.

Every turn the players discard and redraw cards from discard piles and the deck and maintain 6 cards in-hand. The players then choose 1-5 cards, place them in a burlap sack, and declare them to the player taking the role of the sheriff by saying how many cards of one type are in the sack, but the only thing that must be truthful is the number of goods - the actual contents can be contraband or different types of goods. For example, a player says that their sack contains 3 chickens, whereas it actually contains 2 chickens and a crossbow.

It is up to the sheriff to decide who is inspected and who is let in. If the sheriff catches a merchant trying to bring in contraband or different goods than he declared, then that merchant must pay the sheriff the penalty price written on the cards. If the sheriff inspects the bag of a truthful merchant, then the sheriff must compensate the penalty to the player and let the goods go to the merchant stand.

The game is won by the player who has accumulated the most wealth after every player has been the sheriff two times (three times if playing with three players).

The components are all well-made and should hold up to regular wear and tear and even an accidental drop now and then. The game consists of gold coins, merchant stand boards, and a Sheriff marker made from thick cardboard, cards made of durable cardstock, merchant bags made of dense fabric, and a useful foamcore card insert for holding the cards during the gameplay.

Arcane Wonders have made a free mobile companion app for “Sheriff of Nottingham” that helps with keeping the time of inspections if you’re playing with a time limit, keeping score of your finances and who is in the lead, and providing an atmosphere with ambient sounds and voice-acted audio comments.

If you just want to make the game funnier, you can pay 3$ for the “Merchant Fun Pack” to get a clickable soundboard and unlock over 70 more audio comments to spam throughout the game, featuring such highlights as “COUGH Contraband COUGH COUGH” or “Crossbows are illegal, right?”.