Thoughts on The Portal at Hill House

I tried to keep it brief, but I like typing.

Some brief thoughts on The Portal of Hill House.

I liked:

Creating A Floor Plan

Setup isn’t exactly rigorous. Describe the house, roll a few dice, and draft your floor plan. While coming up with your house on the hill is a fun exercise in imagination, the latter was the most interesting part of the process for me.

Then again, I’m a drafter. Your mileage may vary.

My “hill house” tapped into the places that I’d called home growing up—a bevy of single-wide trailers in the middle of nowhere—and ended up being pretty simple thing to sketch. The rules encourage being as elaborate as needed when drafting your floor plan though. Let your imagination run wild in describing your hill house and the process becomes that much more involved.

Location Aspects

The start of the investigation phase is drawing three cards: Hearts for Ambience, Clubs for Objects, and Diamonds for Location Condition. Everything listed comes together to influence the room you are about to explore. I included them in my play reports to be transparent and let people get a look at where some of the ideas found in my writing may have come from.

Obviously, I had a short playthrough so I didn’t get to see or experience a wide range of sparks (I think that’s the terminology). However, the ones I drew were never duds. I may not have been overly enthusiastic about some of them—looking at you, odorous room with just a pile of saltpeter in it—but I wasn’t left without a direction to go in. The options are flavorful and that flavor means you aren’t left twisting in the wind because you’ve accidentally drawn a dud of a combination. I don’t think there is a dud here.

Also, due to not paying any amount of attention when playing this game, I failed to notice that there were two versions of this section in the book and I am pretty sure that I was just using whichever one I flipped to. I encourage doing the same.

Things that were fine:

The rest of the game.

At the end of the day, the game is pretty simple. Draw your flavor, journal what you’ve found during your exploration, and draw a Spade to see how time progresses. Set up is the most complicated process and it isn’t complicated.

It’s fine. It works. There are a couple pages of variant options to make your game more complex and/or longer. I didn’t use them and, frankly, wouldn’t use them. I love writing, but I am a firm believer in things not outstaying their welcome. The longer something goes on and the more complexity and restrictions are added, the more likely it is that I get frustrated and find something else to do.

Mileage, as always, varies.

And so…

I enjoyed my time with The Portal at Hill House. It kicked my imagination into gear, threw in some additional fun by way of drafting, and didn’t stick around long enough for me to see if it would get tedious. It also happens to be the first solo journaling game I’ve stuck with and completed, which is kind of big deal.

You can get the game at the link I’ve been posting all week. You might already have it if you have purchased any bundles in the past few years. Itch.io tells me that I got it from one of those, but digital format games just sort of disappear into my file system never to be seen or remembered again. Instead, I picked up a physical copy here when it came back in print.