I am continuing to work on my King-inspired board games chapter, with much of last week focusing on the Betrayal at House on the Hill (3rd ed., 2022) expansion Betrayal at Neibolt House: The Evil of Pennywise (2025).

Here’s a bit of that work in progress:

Betrayal at Neibolt House: The Evil of Pennywise is an expansion for the third edition of the Betrayal at the House on the Hill, which features a gameplay narrative inspired by Muschietti’s IT Chapter Two. While a central strategic element of Betrayal at House on the Hill is the variability of different scenarios, this expansion builds around the established narrative of Muschietti’s IT films and one reviewer argues that “By anchoring everything around IT, the Pennywise expansion gives Betrayal a cohesive spine” (“Game Review”), including familiar villains, settings, and storylines. The rooms from Betrayal at House on the Hill provide a familiar foundation for gameplay, with The Evil of Pennywise adding four additional locations: the Old Well, a Darkened Hallway, Pennywise’s Ancient Den, and Winding Tunnels. Each of these are established settings and sites of horror from Muschietti’s film, with the Winding Tunnels tile having a particularly unique feature, in which the “tile counts as two unconnected tiles” (Betrayal at Neibolt House) requiring heightened knowledge to successfully navigate, a game mechanic that echoes the Losers Club’s ingenuity and perseverance in making their way through the sewers beneath Derry. There are multiple IT-specific monstrous villains that characters may encounter, including undead versions of Georgie Denbrough and Patrick Hockstetter, Pennywise in his traditional clown form and in his Pennywise spider form, adult Henry Bowers, and Stan Uris’s decapitated spider-legged head. In Betrayal at House on the Hill, there are a wide range of story catalysts that may draw the characters to the house, including paranormal investigation and a missing friend, but in The Evil of Pennywise, there is a single premise, the irresistible invitation for players to “Come Home to Evil.” As the setup instructions read, “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” (Betrayal at Neibolt House). In terms of transmedia engagement, The Evil of Pennywise draws on player familiarity with the worlds and narratives of King’s novel, Muschetti’s films, and the base game Betrayal at House on the Hill, bringing together a range of narrative elements for engagement and active negotiation through individual and collective gameplay. 

The Evil of Pennywise’s playable characters synthesize the narratives of IT and Betrayal at House on the Hill: while the narrative and villains are drawn directly from Muschietti’s IT Chapter Two, the cast of playable characters are those from Betrayal at House on the Hill. There are a wide range of characters in Betrayal at House on the Hill, ranging from children to teens and adults, all of whom have different strength levels in the attribute categories of Speed, Might, Knowledge, and Sanity. This is a significant difference between The Evil of Pennywise and Evil Below, in which players identify with and take on the role of the one of the young members of the Loser’s Club. In The Evil of Pennywise, the setting and even the narrative premise—a return to Derry after twenty-seven years away—is identical to that in Muschietti’s film, but the scope of the horror is expanded, something that transcends the Losers Club to infiltrate Derry more broadly. Separating the narrative framework and gameplay from familiar characters allows players to take a new kind of ownership of the story, as new characters within familiar scenarios. King’s novel is massive in scope, providing a history of Derry, as well as vignettes from many of Derry’s citizens, who have their own encounters with Pennywise, and The Evil of Pennywise capitalizes on Pennywise’s pervasive influence throughout the town. The range of characters from Betrayal at House on the Hill and the premise of The Evil of Pennywise result in some unique character implications: as the rulebook’s story setup reads, “Some of you will see yourself as you are now, as adults. But some of you might see yourself as you were back then, as kids, just trying to find your way during one long hot summer in the Barrens” (2). Thematically, this echoes Muschietti’s IT Chapter Two, which cuts back and forth between the adult Losers’ return to Derry and their flashbacks to their childhood experiences. While Muschietti’s IT Chapter One emphasizes the kids’ solidarity with and support of one another, the flashbacks in IT Chapter Two reveal darker truths, including the secrets they keep and their conflicts with one another, which separate them and threaten their collective strength. This element of Muschietti’s IT Chapter Two draws the IT narrative into alignment with the larger aims and strategies of Betrayal at House on the Hill, with the Pennywise-generated haunts reflecting the complicated nature of the Losers Club’s group dynamics, and of the five new haunt scenarios, “three of the haunts have a traitor, while two have no traitors, so percentage-wise there are fewer haunts with traitors in this expansion” (Biewer). The Evil of Pennywise takes a complex approach in its approach to characterization, drawing on character themes and dynamics, while grounding the game narrative in new characters that blur the lines between fictional worlds and between past and present. 

[Quotes are from PopInsider “Game Review” and Christopher Biewer’s “Betrayal at the Neibolt House Review” on BoardGameQuest.com