A Conversation with the Developers of BETRAYAL AT MYSTERY MANSION
Later this month, Betrayal at Mystery Mansion will be released. It takes the core mechanics and gameplay of Betrayal at House on the Hill and uses characters and stories from Scooby-Doo. I was given the great pleasure of speaking with the game’s developers Noah Cohen and Brian Neff. We had a lovely chat about the game, Scooby-Doo, and more. Betrayal at Mystery Mansion will be available to play on July 24.
Tommy: Well, let's cut straight to it. You guys designed Betrayal at Mystery Mansion which is, I kind of hesitate to use the word reskin, but it kind of is a reskin of Betrayal at House on the Hill using Scooby-Doo characters and adventures and things like that. Now I've played Betrayal for years now. Me and my wife. We love it. Scooby-Doo is a very natural fit for Betrayal. It's a very horror themed game. You're going around as a group of friends, exploring a haunted house, nothing else screams Scooby-Doo quite as much. So I'm curious. How did this come about? How did this Scooby-Doo Betrayal game come about in the first place? Like, did you guys pitch it, did someone else pitch it and they brought you guys in?
Brian: So what ended up happening is, a little bit before this project started, the year before this project started Noah and I were both working on Betrayal Legacy with Rob Daviau. We both got pulled onboard midway through that game and we sort of developed a relationship with Shelly and with Wizards of the Coast and all that sort of stuff. Betrayal Legacy launched, did pretty well, and you know, a couple of months later after that Shelly came to us and she said, "Hey, we, we have some interest from Warner brothers and doing the Scooby-Doo game for Betrayal. What do you think?" And you know, both of us were like, yes, instantly. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Which, you know, it's like, like you said, it's, it's such a natural fit and so many people on the internet for years before this have been saying, "Oh, Scooby-Doo and this thing meld really, well, let me write my own haunts" or do all of that sort of stuff. So it was sort of neat to see Shelly and Wizards just sort of embrace that whole hog and say, "we're just going to do it."
Noah: Yeah. Just to touch on the, on the re-skin thing real quick. Ever since Betrayal at House on the Hill, there've been more...they're not expansions. And I wouldn't even really call them reskins. They're more an adaptation of what I now call the Betrayal system, which is you are exploring a house. You're using the kind of iconic Betrayal dice that have zeros ones and twos on them. Eventually, a haunt happens and the game shifts from being a co-op exploration game to one of you is now out to get the others. And they all really hold pretty closely to that concept. So you can use the term reskin if you want, but I think it's more an adaptation of the Betrayal system to the Scooby-Doo universe. And it was one that we were really excited to work on. Yeah.
Tommy: Okay. So you mentioned that you guys worked on Betrayal Legacy but you did not help work on the original Betrayal at House on the Hill.
Noah: No, I was in high school.
Tommy: What was it like to work both on Betrayal Legacy and Betrayal at Mystery Mansion using someone else's already developed system and mechanics? What was that like to kind of put your own spin on or work on something that wasn't originally yours?
Noah: It was, it's an interesting playground space to be in when you're designing because there are a different set of constraints. When you're starting from scratch, you know, you add whatever mechanics you want to to get the experience that you want with. With an adaptation like this, you a little bit start with essentially two sets of IP. One of them controls the creative aspect and the other one helps guide you in terms of what mechanics are on and off limits. And to one degree it's a little bit easier and to another degree, it's a little bit difficult. So a lot of the work is already laid out and we were very familiar with it from working on Betrayal Legacy. So that on one hand made writing the haunts go very quickly. And then on the other you know, we had a very different target audience for this game. The original Betrayal and Betrayal Legacy are both for 13, 14-year-old plus, all the way up to me and, older. And then this one, we were very specifically looking to appeal to a much younger audience like eight years old and that area, and also people who are new to board gaming in general and Betrayal in specific. So what we really wanted to do was take all of the elements that you at a glance recognize, "Oh, that's Betrayal" and also all of the elements that make you go, "Oh, that's Scooby" and make sure that we included all of those while also toning down the complexity of the Betrayal system to match our new target audience.
Brian: Yeah. Also, from the thematic end, toning down a little bit of the violence. You know, cause in the original Betrayal, sometimes the haunt will go off and a serial killer will jump out a closet and stab you and you can't do that [in] Scooby-Doo nor did we want to. So, you know, right at the beginning, we had all of this stuff where we were just like, "well, let's write a haunt as though we're writing this thing. We'll use all of the regular Betrayal rules and we'll see where to go from there. That seems like a good starting place." And so we watched the very first episode of Scooby-Doo which is "What a Night for a Knight." We wrote it down as a haunt and we played it out and it worked surprisingly well, you know, until the knight sort of came up and cut Scooby's head off and then we were like, "Oh no, we can't do that. No." We sort of used the original, we used as much of Betrayal as we could as a starting point. And then, you know, went through the rules line by line and said, "do we need this? Can we cut this? Can we replace this with something simpler? Can we sort of do that?" That was the place that we kept on coming back to when we were developing, this was, we need to make this successful. We need to make this a family game that you'll pick up and say, "Oh, I'm gonna play this with my kids." So it's very much sort of what we were aiming for as far as that goes.
Tommy: It's funny you bring up "What a Night for a Knight." So far I've only been able to play through Betrayal at Mystery Mansion once so far; me and my wife, we have a real simple way of adapting it for just the two of us to get a quick game here and there, but we ended up triggering "What a Night for a Knight" and I gotta say A, it was the fastest game of Betrayal I have ever played. The haunt was triggered in about in four turns. And B it's really fun. I would say in my opinion, in my one experience with it, you guys have really succeeded in simplifying the game without making it easier. If that makes sense. You didn't sacrifice how hard the game can be or how frustrating it can be sometimes, but you made it simpler. I want to applaud to you guys on that. It really is something where, when my daughter's a little older, she is a huge Scooby-Doo nut. She's watching, Scooby-Doo all the time when she's at home. When she's a little older, I'm going to have no problem being like, "okay, this is how we play" and I'm not going to have to wait until she's a teenager, like the other Betrayal games.
Brian: Well, we're very happy to hear that. And hopefully, Mystery Mansion gives you a good couple of years before you can sort of then introduce her to all of the other...
Noah: Everything else that's out there.
Brian: Then you have all of the big boxes.
Tommy: So, you kind of mentioned that you guys watched "What a Night for a Knight," how big of Scooby-Doo fans are you? How much have you seen? Lay it on, lay it on?
Noah: I grew up watching it.
Brian: Yeah, both of us grew up watching it. So, the older, sort of the first couple of seasons that we had to go on are a little bit before my time, but I did grow up watching them on Boomerang and all of that sort of stuff and the reruns on Cartoon Network after school. So you know, Scooby-Doo was sort of in my blood as far as that sort of stuff goes.
Noah: Yeah. So one thing we also definitely took the time to do, we watched the first episode and tried to turn that into a huant and then realized, "okay, this can work." We immediately then watched all of the rest of the IP that we were able to use. Not all 50 years of it that's a lot, but we went straight through the first three seasons. I just watched all of them. Our writer watched all of them and she took exhaustive notes which were amazingly helpful. And yeah, we wanted to make sure that when you are playing any of these games, if you have watched the source material, you recognize what's going on. And, you know, there might be tweaks here and there, but you still would say, "Oh, that feels like this episode. I see what's going on. I remember that one cool point in this episode." Or, "I remember that part of this movie," and that was definitely front and center for us. We wanted this to feel very much like you were part of that episode, and in some cases, things turn out the same way they do in the episode and in some cases they don't. The bad guy's allowed to win.
Brian: Yeah, we all sort of came into this cause Rob and our writer whose name is Banana Chan all really big Scooby-Doo fans and so we all came in with like, "we have to make sure to get this episode and this thing and that sort of thing." And so, when we started writing it, we did the thing with the first episode and then we watched the second episode and we wrote that down as a haunt and we played it and it worked. And so, we all just sort of took steps to say, like...it was something that we realized very early on in the process when we said, "well, each of these haunts is just an episode of Scooby-Doo." Because if you sit down and you watch through an episode of Scooby-Doo, it's, it's just a Betrayal haunt. They go into a creepy place, they explore for a little bit, they find some clues, and the monster jumps out and they have to defeat the monster. And so you know, we all sort of came with our episodes. You know, mine was was the "Warlock of Wimbleton." It was one that I watched when I was much, much younger. I tooth and nail was like, "we have to put this one in." And it's in there. It's haunt 16.
Noah: Yeah. We actually...One of the things that we did was we drew up a list of Scooby tropes that we wanted to make sure were a thing that you could experience and appreciate. So, you know, there are definitely some sandwiches there's a situation where you get scared and it turns out it was just some leaves fluttering or you go to explore and all of the scenery looks the same. One thing they did in the original episodes was whenever they were doing the walking scene, you know, why draw 30 feet of corridor when you can draw eight feet of corridor and repeat it.
Brian: Yeah, running into doors and popping out of other doors in the same hallway.
Noah: Yeah. Just all these iconic experiences from when you're watching the old episodes, we wanted to make sure that they could show up and make their little cameo appearance. And we wrote down a massive list of those and tried to get as many as we could. I think we did a pretty good job. There's definitely a lot of fun stuff in there for fans of the first few seasons. We're pretty excited with how much content we got in there that was pretty contiguous with Scooby-Doo.
Tommy: Now real quick, I know that the game hasn't even released yet, but do you think there's potential for expansions that may use up some of the other iterations of Scooby-Doo? I mean, like you said, there are 50 years of Scooby-Doo, there's Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?; Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo; The New Scooby-Doo Movies; Be Cool Scooby-Doo; Scooby-Doo and Guess Who; What's New Scooby-Doo?, like, do you think there's potential?
Noah: One or two episodes is what you're saying. Yeah.
Brian: Yeah. One or two extra episodes. You know, as soon as I can use the Globetrotters and Batman, come on. No, whatever the future of Betrayal and Betrayal at Mystery Mansion holds, Shelly will be able to answer that much, much better than we will. She runs the schedule and all of that sort of stuff. We are you know...anything that comes up, we are very excited about whether or not we get to work on it, for sure. Cause we are first and foremost fans, but we can't speak to the future of Betrayal yet.
Tommy: So, I noticed something, and maybe you guys don't have any control over this, but I was reading on the back of the character cards in normal Betrayal. It just gives you a second character, in this it gives you a very small brief bio of the character. And most of them, I sat there, went, "Okay. Yeah, no, that, that about makes sense. You know, yeah Fred is all about this. It makes sense that Shaggy would be a cook. I mean, with all he eats and, you know, Daphne, if you watch the show, you understand, she's always got some crazy thing like martial arts going on. So sure. I believe that." Velma though, Velma's card talks about, she has a love for lifting weights.
Brian: It's true.
Noah: This is all canon.
Tommy: I have seen a lot of Scooby-Doo. Where is this love of weightlifting from?
Brian: We were lucky enough to have access to a lot of Scooby resources, and it was one of the things that we actually asked about. You know, whenever we were talking back and forth with the WB, we got to ask them a couple of questions to sort of help us along our way. And it was one, it was one of our questions where we said, "Is there anything interesting about the characters that you would like to include on that?" And that was one of the things that they said. I think we had the same reaction where we were like, "excuse me, she does what?" But there are a couple of episodes where Velma gets to sort of Hulk out and, you know, lift some very heavy things. So it's canon. Velma's really into lifting weights.
Noah: One of the other ones that was pretty funny was that we wanted to put the characters, catchphrases on their little character tab. And you know, so Scooby's got "Rut Roh" and Velma's got "Jinkies," and we got to Fred and he doesn't have one. And not only does he not have one, but in more recent episodes of Scooby, they made fun of the fact that he doesn't have one, which was really funny. So we had to kind of come up with something that he says a lot. That's not an official catchphrase and settled on "Okay, gang" because he does say that I think every episode.
Brian: Let's go gang. We yeah, we wanted to put "let's split up gang," but it wouldn't have fit on the card.
Tommy: That would've been a good one!
Noah: That's the other thing he says a lot.
Tommy: That's funny. That actually makes me think of...I don't know if you guys have watched the latest iteration, Scooby-Doo and Guess Who but on there they actually have an episode with Ricky Gervais and he talks about how they each have their own little catchphrases, but something that they did in this iteration was they did give Fred a catchphrase.
Noah: Oh, he's got one now?
Tommy: "Hold the phone."
Noah: [erupts laughing]. I love it.
Tommy: He's always saying "hold the phone gang." So it's funny because no, you're right. I didn't even think about it until that episode with Ricky Gervais' but yeah. Fred doesn't have anything for the longest time.
Brian: He's the audience foil. We're all Fred. We're all Fred Jones a little bit.
Tommy: So, I know you talked about Warlock of Wimbleton being your hill to die on. Noah, what was a haunt that you just said, "this has to go in?"
Noah: Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. It is one of my favorite, not just cartoon movies, not just Scooby-Doo movies, it's one of my favorite movies that are animated period. I think it's actually just a quality movie to watch. So I was adamant that we needed to get that in there. Despite it being three times as long as a regular episode so there's a lot more to try to cram in and get it to work. We ended up having to pick an element to turn into the haunt instead of the whole thing 'cause that would have been just not feasible, but it's one of my favorite movies. I wanted to make sure we got a nod to it in here. And I'm happy to say we did
Tommy: As a fan. Thank you. I grew up Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. I grew up on that. I've seen so many Scooby-Doo movies, I sit there and go, none of them hold a candle to Zombie Island.
Noah: So good!
Tommy: Zombie Island is incredible. So thank you for including that one. Just promise me you didn't throw in Return to Zombie Island.
Noah: I don't think we have that one on there.
Brian: Nope, we don't.
Tommy: Good. That one's not as good. So, how did you go about deciding what made an episode a haunt? Was it just as you sat down and watched you went, "Oh, I really liked this episode. Let's turn it into a haunt?"
Noah: To a degree. I think there were 62 episodes/movies that were available for the IP section that we were supposed to be using. Which, you know, when you need to cut that down to 25 haunts, if your goal is to get each one to match to a thing, you run out of room pretty quick. So we started with the ones that, "Hey, we really liked this one. Let's turn it into a haunt." And then we also paid attention to how easy it would be to turn into a haunt. By that, I mean Scooby-Doo is traditionally a three act story. There's the, let's go explore the place. Hey, there's something going on. Then there's usually an extended chase scene where they don't know who the monster is and also haven't caught them yet so they're interacting with them. And then there's like this little post scene where they have captured the monster or stop them in some capacity and now, "all right, let's see, what's really underneath this mask." Whereas Betrayal is very much a two act game. There's exploring and then there's frantic what's going on. We need to solve the problem here. What we did was we took the episodes where it was the easiest to go from that three act structure to the two act structure where you have the exploration and then you have a unique fight scene experience that we could turn into the second half of the haunt. We wanted to make sure each of these felt different.
Brian: And it was definitely, you know, a lot of it was figuring out which of those narratives sort of translated correctly. 'Cause you know, Scooby-Doo is very much a product of the seventies and so a lot of times you'll be watching it and unless you have one of the characters actually guiding you through the narrative, sometimes the ending just doesn't make sense. And that was something that we wanted to make sure in each of the haunts was like, we had a very clear sort of A to B to C.This is how the story is going to work. In order to make sure that that we didn't end up with haunts that sort of left you scratching your head at the end.
Noah: There were a couple episodes where you're like, "and that was your plan?"
Brian: There are a couple of haunts that end up like that way. Our writer likes to poke fun at some of that stuff. So some of the flavor text at the end, we'll definitely call out like, "Oh, this was a bad plan. I guess that's why, I guess that's why those kids caught me."
Tommy: It's kind of incredible how these adults think that they know so much and yet these, you know, teenagers are able to sit there and go, "you're an idiot."
Brian: Yeah. Yeah.
Tommy: I know that we briefly talked already about how you guys really worked to simplify things, make it more accessible to younger players and just people who maybe aren't used to more "hardcore games." You know, the people who typically play like Life, Monopoly, the "staples" of board gaming. I noticed going through that, a lot of the stats for characters are the same or within like one point, was that part of this whole idea of simplifying things?
Noah: Yes. We wanted you to be able to play whoever you wanted when you were playing and not feel like, "Oh, I really want to play as Velma, but her stat line just isn't doing it for me." So one of the things we wanted to do was to avoid the situation that you sometimes get in the original Betrayal, where just because of the characters that you guys picked at the start, the haunt is too easy or too hard. You know, you happen to not pick anyone who had a high strength and then you didn't pick up any items that improved your might. Now you are just going to, we didn't want people being victims to just sheer fate. So we, we flattened the line a little bit to allow you to have just a little bit more control or at least the luck is "it could have gone the other way," not, "Oh, I picked the wrong character at the start of the game and 45 minutes later, I'm realizing that was a problem."
Brian: And I think also, from that perspective there, we had two sort of issues that we wanted to handle and the stats were a way that we sort of handled them. The first one was there was an issue in a lot of of earlier Betrayal games where you'll have a trait that'll go 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 7. And for a person that's sort of getting into this game for the first time, that's relatively difficult to explain.
Noah: Your trait goes up, but not your score?
Brian: Right. And so the thing that we wanted to make sure was that everybody who sits down and picks this up can sort of open it up and say like, "Oh, when I move up, I move to the next number." And that makes that very explainable, I think. And then the second one was sort of like we were talking about earlier. We did want to aim this at families and things like that, and it's difficult to convince an [8-year-old] to sit down for a 90 minute experience. And so one of the things that we really focused on was making sure that the games were a little shorter. One of the ways that we did that is in the stats. There are much fewer stats between the top and the bottom because it's very easy come easy go as far as gaining bonuses and losing bonuses and taking damage and all of that sort of stuff. That really helped us sort of condense the experience down to, you know, we explore this house for a little bit and then this haunt goes off and then it's three or four rounds and the haunt is over. And then, if you do have a kid who's remarkably well behaved and can handle a 90 minute experience, you can just play two games.
Tommy: Sounds pretty great to me. Thank you so much for answering those questions. Now, I want to ask you guys a couple more personal questions. What is each of yours current favorite game?
Brian: Oh, man. Like video game or board game?
Tommy: I'll take either, but I'm shooting more for board game.
Brian: I have been playing a lot of Everdell. Everdell is incredible. It is a super slick engine builder. You play some cards, you get to be cute little animals especially because it's two player. I can play it with my spouse. It's an excellent, excellent game to just sort of pick up and play. It takes about an hour.
Noah: One of my favorites is a bit of an old standby. And that's Lords of Waterdeep.
Brian: I love Lords of Waterdeep. I should've said Lords of Waterdeep, too.
Noah: I think it's one of the better worker placement games that you can find that manages to tackle a familiar area of IP. There are a lot of Dungeons & Dragons style games, but it does it in a way that you don't normally see where you are playing essentially one of the NPCs of the normal D&D genre. Instead you are using the player characters as peons, as little expendable heroes to use, which I thought was just really clever. But in terms of worker placement and the engine building that you can do, I really, really, really enjoy it. It's one that I can usually get my wife to agree to play. It plays well with two, it plays more people to varying degrees of success, but I really enjoy playing it. And I would definitely recommend it even though it's not exactly a new game.
Brian: Yeah. It's definitely a lot of two player games around here because of our, this sort of ongoing global situation.
Tommy: Yep. I feel that. When designing a game, what's your favorite part of the process?
Brian: The first two weeks. The first two weeks is my favorite part and it's not because I don't like sort of getting down in nitty gritty with the numbers. It is because during that first two weeks, anything is possible. It's before you've run into all of the problems, it's before anything comes up, it's before you've played tested it, and before you see that you have a lot of dumb ideas. It's that sort of perfect moment in time when all ideas are good ideas. You know, and I think that's probably my favorite part just because it's so exciting, especially when you're working with a team. To be able to sort of go around the room and just say like, "your good idea and my good idea, and let's jam those together and let's sort of do this." And a lot of times you end up with these like Frankenstein monstrosities, but eventually you do the work and you put out a finished game on the other side.
Noah: Actually, conversely, one of my favorite parts of designing the game is after you more or less have the broad system locked down and you're getting into, "okay, well, how do we use the system to express an individual component?" And by that, I mean, okay, well, we figured out how we wanted items to work in Betrayal at Mystery Mansion. Well, what does a sandwich look like? Because we want to make a sandwich, an item, how do we make that function within the bounds of what we have defined as an item? How does it work? What does it actually do? And you know, that sort of thing extends into most games that have an individual card component where there's a more general set of rules of this is how the cards in the game work. And then when you actually look at the cards, they're breaking rules left and right. And the way that they do it is what makes the theme and the mechanics on the card kind of come together. Like, "Oh, I see why this represents a fireball in this game, because it does this and this and this that's really cool." So Brian likes a lot of the stuff that happens before you get the system locked down. And I like a lot of stuff that happens after you get the system locked down. I'd say one of the most difficult parts is that part in the middle where you have to actually lock down the system. I think the two bits on the end, numbers tweaks aside, where you get to do the most playing and in the middle is where you have to make the hard guts.
Tommy: So you just need to find a third person to join your little duo and become a trio and you'll be great. Thank you so much for your time. One last question. I know that you guys have been hard at work with Mystery Mansion, and I know that release is coming up. Are there any other projects that you're able to talk about at this time that fans should be on the lookout for maybe have an ear out for?
Noah: Yeah. One that we are currently hard at work on completing and I don't know how much of a plug we're allowed to do...[we got the ok]...but we are hard at work on delivering Return to Dark Tower with Restoration Games which is a remake of a much older game called Dark Tower, shocker, that did really well on Kickstarter. Now we're working hard to make sure it actually delivers the experiences that we want. But we're really excited for when that is out and available. It's going to be epic.
Brian: It's going to be epic. It had better be epic.
Noah: It had better be epic!
Brian: I've had the pleasure of continuing to work with Noah after this project. And so we've been working on a lot of stuff together. As far as that stuff goes, I think Return to Dark Tower, I think is probably the biggest thing that we can talk about and I think all of our other stuff is in various phases of, we can't talk about it yet.
Tommy: Well, when you can talk about it, feel free to reach out to me. I would love to work with you guys some more. Thank you so much for your time. As Scooby-Doo fans, if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend the series Be Cool Scooby-Doo. It's definitely a goofier take on the show, but it's hilarious. So I highly recommend it.
Brian: I did get to watch an episode of Be Cool Scooby-Doo.
Tommy: It's fantastic.
Brian: Yeah, it's very good.
Tommy: It's probably my favorite out of the like seven iterations I've seen.
Noah: They've reimagined Scooby-Doo a bunch and I've enjoyed all the versions that I've seen. I'll have to take a look at this one.
Brian: Yeah. I went through and I was reading the Scooby-Doo Apocalypse comics for a little bit, and I was like, "that was a left turn.”
Tommy: So thank you so much. Have a wonderful day. And honestly Betrayal at Mystery Mansion, I know I haven't played it very much, but it's so much fun.
Brian: We're super happy that you enjoy it.
Noah: Success. That was the goal.