Cosmic Encounter vs Betrayal at House on the Hill

The basic rules of the game are background noise. The alien powers, both individually and as they interact with each other, determine the dynamic of each game you play, and each dynamic is radically different. For example, you can try different races and alien powers each time you play, and the way to mix and match them is almost limitless. This makes every game feel different than the one before it.

It's almost impossible to win on your own. When attacking or defending, you will get the chance to ask for allies on your turn, or assist others when they are engaged. Allies can help you win the attack or defense, but they will also gain benefits if successful. It is a team-based game, although each player is out for themselves in the end.

One of the neatest parts of the game are the negotiate cards - instead of laying down an attack card you can try to negotiate. If you both play negotiate cards, you have 1 minute to come to an agreement which can include creating new colonies, trading cards, or virtually anything. If the players don't come to agreeable terms within a minute, they both suffer a hefty penalty (4 of their ships are sent to the warp).

With so many unique combinations of alien powers and the fact you can form unstable alliances with other players, there's so many ways to get creative. For example, knowing when and where to pick your battles. Perhaps two other players just had an epic battle and now they're down a few ships - it would be the perfect time to swoop in and try to colonize their planets when they're weakened. Perhaps you have a special power that will give you an edge in a certain fight against another player. By paying attention to what's going on around you at all times, skillful tacticians will find all kinds of extremely clever or amusing plays to be possible.

Illustrations on Alien Power cards are beautifully rendered and imaginative. Each one features full color, hand drawn creatures that are distinctly unique and look like something out of a sci-fi movie.

At the beginning of each game, players are given 3-4 alien powers to choose from, usually taken at random. However, if you were trying to put together a specific theme - for example, a war between certain aliens races, or a battle using only certain powers - you can manually select the set of powers available to each player. This allows you to generate personalized games that have specific story to them or heavily revolve around a particular strategy or resource.

Working with or against other players, forming unstable alliances, and negotiating with other players creates some situations which will test your real world social skills.

There are six expansions which not only add a minimum of 20 new alien races with new powers each, but they also brings unique gameplay mechanics to the table. For example, Cosmic Conflict adds space quake hazards, and Cosmic Alliance adds new rules for teams and expands the game to 7 players.

After you play one or two games, the basic mechanics become trivial to work with. Additionally, you only have to worry about learning as many alien powers as you have players in the game, so your personal knowledge and experience with the powers can grow slowly over time. Most alien powers take a minute or two to really understand, then the fun begins of finding creative or unique ways to develop strategies around them.

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.