Where Welcome to Derry ends, this Pennywise game expansion begins

HBO Max’s It: Welcome to Derry leaps into nightmare territory early and often. Producer/creator Andy Muschietti and showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane assume viewers are already familiar with Stephen King’s 1986 novel It and/or Muschietti’s movie adaptations, 2017’s It and 2019’s It: Chapter Two. So they don’t waste time on exposition before ripping into the bloody guts of their prequel, about the earlier days of Derry’s personal nightmare, Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård).

For gamers who’ve been tuning into the show, enjoying those creepy vibes, and feeling an urge to continue exploring King’s world as season 1 wraps up, it’s the perfect time to pull out Betrayal at the Neibolt House: The Evil of Pennywise, a difficult but rewarding 2025 expansion to Betrayal at House on the Hill, the popular board-game stalwart that’s been killing off intrepid explorers since 2004. The expansion can be frustrating — there are some particularly difficult challenges in here, seemingly aimed at Betrayal veterans. But it certainly channels the dread of Muschietti’s movies and Welcome to Derry, and the considerable threat Pennywise brings to any face-off.

The Evil of Pennywise expansion establishes three to six players as a team of in-the-know Pennywise veterans who grew up in King’s beloved horror setting of Derry, Maine. As children, the player characters were hunted by It, but they fought back and defeated the creature. It’s been 27 years since that battle. The characters sense It has reawakened, so they all return to Derry to fight it again, in the haunted-house setting from Muschietti’s movies. (A cute wrinkle: The rules specify that when facing Pennywise, the players may see themselves in their current adult form or as the kids they were 27 years ago, meaning that any existing Betrayal character could be in play, regardless of their age.)

Like other Betrayal expansions, Evil of Pennywise requires the base game, now in its third edition. The expansion replaces the existing Omen cards with 10 “Pennywise Encounter” cards, and adds four new location tiles, but the mechanics largely remain the same.

Players’ standees start out in the lobby of a mysterious, decrepit house, which they’ll generate themselves piece by piece, drawing face-down tiles from a stack and adding them to the existing (often illogical and irrational) architecture. Symbols on the tiles prompt players to draw cards as they enter new rooms, accumulating items or facing supernatural challenges that may boost or drain their stats. Eventually, as event cards pile up, the house will trigger a Haunt, a supernatural event the characters have to survive. Each Haunt has different win conditions.

Image: Polygon

Evil of Pennywise includes five new Haunts, all drawn from King’s story. Three of those Haunts turn one player at the table into the “Traitor,” the newly revealed or converted evil force hunting down the other players in a many-vs.-one scenario. Two Haunts just launch a mechanical attacker controlled by the board, in a players-vs.-game co-op scenario.

All five Haunts are unsettlingly appropriate to the It setting, but some are scarier than others. In one, you’re chased by a knife-wielding, grown-up version of your childhood bully Henry Bowers, and he slowly self-destructs if he fails to hunt you down. But even that isn’t as nerve-wracking as facing down a mutant spider-clown version of Pennywise, which has significantly higher damage stats and a much creepier mini for the board. (The expansion also includes a Henry mini and a normal Pennywise the Clown mini.)

A sense of overwhelming dread increases significantly if you’re playing with Betrayal fans who don’t know the It setting. In my playtests, I was the only person at the table who’d seen both Muschietti movies, watched episodes of Welcome to Derry, and read Stephen King’s novel. In spite of the expansion’s effective, evocative text, which sets up the overall It scenario and underlines Pennywise’s powers to tap into your fears and exploit them, my playtesters just didn’t find Henry’s Haunt nearly as alarming or overwhelming as Spider-Pennywise charging at them.

Image: Polygon

Both of those Haunts also paled in comparison to our biggest challenge: “All Living Things Must Abide,” where Pennywise comes after the players in the form of various monsters. The players can only win against these horrors by researching their (startlingly specific!) weaknesses, then hunting down the right tools to fight each one of them in turn. Meanwhile, the monsters are attacking the players physically and psychically.

It certainly feels appropriate to be overmatched and overwhelmed in an It-derived game. As we see in the book, the movies, and Welcome to Derry, the kids fighting It are usually in way over their heads, and even experienced adults don’t have much advantage, given Pennywise’s powers.

That said, several of Evil of Pennywise’s Haunts bend the standard Betrayal fight rules in ways that give It a distinct advantage, making it likely that some characters will be killed early and quickly. That leaves them with no role to play in the game as their fellow players continue the Haunt — a common gripe against Betrayal as a whole.

Image: Avalon Hill

Another notable complaint about the expansion is that it feels small compared to some others. Like 2023’s expansion Betrayal: The Yuletide Tale – Evil Reigns in the Wynter’s Pale, Evil of Pennywise only includes five new Haunts, as opposed to the 25 new Haunts in the 2020 Scooby-Doo! Betrayal at Mystery Mansion spin-off. Then there’s Widow’s Walk, which introduced 50 new Haunts and a new house level.

The $25 price tag for Evil of Pennywise seems reasonable enough given the materials in the expansion: the four new house tiles, 10 Encounter cards and a scenario card, three minis, separate rulebooks for the new Haunts for players and Traitors, and punch-out cardboard markers for the new monsters. But as someone who doesn’t really care about elaborate minis, I’d personally prefer more Haunts to boost the game’s replayability.

The individual Haunts really had my playtest group running and panicking, due to their high lethality and challenging win conditions. We managed to just barely squeak through and win each of our scenarios, but it seemed like an unlikely long-shot win in every case. Achieving that sense of difficulty is hard to design for, given how varied Betrayal can get in terms of how many resources players manage to accumulate before the Haunt kicks in. While our experiences didn’t leave us frustrated over repeated TPKs, it’s easy to see that razor-thin success margin cutting the other way, and wiping party after party before they even get their feet under them — which does make every victory feel that much sweeter.

Nothing in Evil of Pennywise is quite as grotesque as the multi-faced flying demon-baby or pregnant-stomach-monster the protagonists face in Welcome to Derry’s opening episodes — thankfully, in the board-game version, there’s a lot less blood spray, and there’s always time to think about next strategic steps instead of frantically fleeing. But the sense of danger and difficulty that comes with the expansion is impressive. Pennywise is scary enough that producers keep seeing more reasons to bring him back to the screen. It turns out that in the right scenario, he’s pretty frightening in his game version as well.