Penny For The Poor, Guv'ner?

I hate being broke.  For the past couple months I've been really wanting to give Betrayal at House on the Hill a try.  It's essentially a board game that's divided into two sections:  the first is pretty much a dungeon-crawler, where your characters explore a haunted house, collecting items, taking damage, and so on.

The second half comes about randomly, and is where the betrayal comes in.  One character/player betrays the others, chosen based on a number of factors, and is given the corresponding goal from a special rulebook (usually kill one, or more, of the other players), and the other players are given the appropriate goal from another special rulebook (kill the evil player, escape the house, find an item first, &c).  Game play ends when one side has accomplished their goals.

It's been getting favourable reviews, and is in the running for an Origins Award.  Unfortunately, what with the sheer number of pieces involved, it's not exactly cheap.  Any stores carrying it around here are wanting between 60 and 70 dollars for it, and that's a fair chunk of change at the moment. ($70 is about $10-$20 more than what Amazon.com is charging once you convert the price to Canadian dollars.  About par for a city in which shops routinely charge $10+ over the MSRP for games.)

On the more positive gaming side:  I finally got a chance to play Robo Rally the other weekend.  Quick summary:  you're a bored computer controlling a robot in a race against other computers with too much time on their hands.  Each turn you're given a number of random cards representing possible moves (1, 2, or 3 spaces forwards, 1 space backwards, turn left, turn right, and u-turn), and chose 5 of them to execute for that turn.  As your robot accrues damage (either from other robots, or from obstacles on the map), you start getting fewer and fewer cards.  Once you get too much damage, you start "locking registers" — meaning that commands get locked in, so you may always end a turn sequence with a u-turn, if that happened to be the last move entered in that register.  Victory is declared once someone finally manages to maneuver their robot to all the checkpoints.  It's not exactly the fastest moving game, but it seems like a good way to kill a rainy afternoon.  Unfortunately, Dmitrii always seems to shoot down any plans to play a round of it.

Finally, it must be getting near exam time, as I'm once again having that dream.  It's been two years since I had a class, and even longer since I had a final exam, but I still can't seem to shake the damn thing.