I consider
Betrayal at House on the Hill to be sort of an "Arkham Horror Lite". If I was in the mood for AH, but we didn't have the three or four hours to kill, I'd suggest
Betrayal, which we can usually get through in about half the time.
Now, Fantasy Flight Games is releasing a new stand-alone, mansion crawling game under the Arkham Horror banner which looks more like it has a similar playstyle to Descent. There are plenty of plastic bits and one player takes on the role of bad guy, while the rest of the players are 'investigators' trying to solve the mystery and defeat evil.
Betrayal's biggest drawback (apart from the mountain of eratta in the 1st ed.) was that the versatility of combining different items and locations to generate unique "haunts" made the possibility of expansions difficult if not impossible without having to completely revise everything... which I believe they eventually did.
From what I can see,
Mansions dosn't seem to have that same afliction, and FFG is notorious about setting games up to have piles of expansions.
I would definately want to play this somewhere before I buy it (DragonCon perhaps), but the plastic bits look like they might be usable for Arkham Horror, and I could definately see FFG using that fact to boost the sales of this game and future expansions.
