Betrayal: The Evil of Pennywise Expansion Review - Welcome Back To Derry

Betrayal at House on the Hill is one of my go-to games for replayability. With so many haunts, variability in gameplay, and even the way that a house develops differently sitting down you've always got to be prepared for something new. With the Betrayal At The Niebolt House: The Evil of Pennywise expansion, players get to take on the roles of a group returning after 27 years of torment to put a stop to Pennywise.

Included in the box you'll find a "Come Home To Evil" Scenario Card, ten Pennywise Encounter cards, four tokens, a Henry Bowers character overlay, and three IT-themed miniatures for Henry Bowers, Pennywise the Clown, and Pennywise the Spider. The expansion also includes four new rooms, a thematic story preamble for the Derry setting, and five new haunts inspired by IT Chapter II.

Come Home To Evil
You are a group of friends who survived It's last feeding frenzy in the town of Derry when you were kids. Now, It has stirred again after 27 years, and you've been drawn back to the Neibolt House to confront the savage shapeshifter. As you explore the house and experience nightmarish events, will you turn on your friends? Or will you band together to defeat It once and for all?

What is Betrayal?

If you're new to Betrayal, the basic premise of it is that you and your group of explorers begin in the entrance hall of a mysterious mansion. As you take turns, you'll enter rooms and flip over tiles from a large stack of rooms, building the house as you play the game.

Exploring the house, you'll have a chance to earn items, experience strange and supernatural events, and discover ominous Omens. Once enough Omens have been gathered, a Haunt kicks off.

Once the Haunt kicks off, you're no longer playing a collaborative game of haunted house exploration, but instead, one (or maybe more) of the players will turn to the side of evil. They may have been killed, with the player now controlling monsters in the house, have become evil themselves, or some mix of the two.

Each team of players now has its own unique goals to win the game as new mechanics come into play.

With The Evil of Pennywise, there are a number of changes made to the base game so that no matter what, you always feel like you're part of the universe of IT.

The largest critique of Betrayal: The Evil of Pennywise is also one that it shares with the base game, as you move into the Haunt and there's a chance for players to die if things go awry and if you die quickly, then you're fully out of the game. When these haunts can take 30+ minutes, that's time that you're just not getting to engage in any aspect of the game.

Setting Up Betrayal At The Neibolt House

In order to adapt your game to fit the theme of the expansion, you'll get to add your four new tiles to the game board. From there, you'll start your game as normal with the expansion-specific scenario card.

The largest change is that instead of pulling Omen cards when you see an Omen symbol on a revealed room, you'll instead pull a Pennywise Encounter card. These cards pull inspiration from the source material, where you'll see a red balloon pop and potentially take damage, or overcoming floating lights is able to help you gain sanity.

The four new room tiles are unique to the expansion, but that doesn't mean that they can't be staples of your standard Betrayal experience

Knowing that a few new tiles are in the deck, and you're pulling Pennywise Encounters instead of Omens, is really all you need to change going into The Evil of Pennywise, making setup an incredibly fast process and for it to be familiar for all returning players.

Experiencing The Haunts

Discussing the haunts can be a bit difficult without spoiling too much, so I'll keep it generic here for a bit. There are five themed Haunts in The Evil of Pennywise, each focusing on a key plotpoint from IT Chapter II, whether it be facing Henry Bowers, or facing off against Pennywise The Clown itself.

The game has done a fantastic job of adapting these scenes to best fit the gameplay of Betrayal, with Haunt number 2 in this book probably becoming my favorite Betrayal experience with a great mix of unique gameplay, interesting problems to solve, and a very visible threat continuing to grow until it becomes too much for any player to handle.

To get deeper into the spoilers, each of the different haunts progresses you further through the narrative of the source material. Starting by having to fight Henry Bowers, then getting trapped in a disconnected house, having to find your artifacts, and then performing the ritual and taking on Pennywise.

It almost feels like there should be a recommended goal to build the house, but make alterations so you can do each of the haunts in order to create a legacy game feel as you and your friends make it through the events of IT Chapter 2.

To cap off the experience, I'm a big fan of the final two haunts of the game having no traitor, but Pennywise be an mechanic-driven antagonist. It stays true to the source material while also creating a very unifying experience for the players.

Betrayal: The Evil of Pennywise Review | Final Thoughts

If there was ever a board game to use the IP of IT and Pennywise, Betrayal is the perfect choice. This expansion is incredibly fast to setup, enhances the base game, and allows for you and your friends to experience a variety of mechanically unique haunts.

While only adding five new haunts, this won't take long to get through; each of the haunts is very unique and memorable to the source material.

If you're a fan of Betrayal, there's really no way that more haunts are ever going to be a bad thing, this should be a must buy.

Betrayal: The Evil of Pennywise was reviewed with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 4 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.