HeroCard Nightmare is the sixth release in the HeroCard_series. The series uses the same card-based mechanism to create individual characters for each player. The rules for the card portion of the game remain the same, but the board portion of the game adds new rules.

In HeroCard Nightmare, the players take on the role of one of four people caught in a potentially lethal dream. The winner is the player who is able to identify the fears of the other players and use them to eliminate them from the dream.

Components
The game comes with 4 hero decks with 33 cards each, 1 plastic dreamer figures, 5 plastic killer figures, 7 death scene tiles, 5 killer cards, 7 scene cards, 4 reference cards, and a rule book. All the components are well-produced.

The rulebook is 28 pages and includes instructions for the HeroCard game, plus the instructions for this particular boardgame. It is color throughout with plenty of illustrations and examples. The cards are of good stock and the scene tiles are thick with nice art. Overall the game components are excellent.

Setting/Theme
The idea is that your character is trapped in a dream and the only way for you to escape is to kill the other characters. This works out pretty well and the artwork of the cards and scenes as well as the game rules neatly support that idea. There is a slight hiccup because two of the characters are supposed to be in love, but have to kill each other to survive. Other than that, the theme is excellent and is well-supported by the rules and the components.

Rules
The object of the game is to manipulate the dream to determine which scene and killer frightens each player and then to use that knowledge to kill them. The determination of who is affected by which scene and killer is similar to Clue or other deduction games, although the addition of the HeroCard rules makes it something more.

The game basically has two sets of rules. The first section of the rulebook details the HeroCard system, which basically governs how you can use your hero deck. The second part explains how the card game rules interact with the boardgame to create a complete game.

The HeroCard system is not particularly complex. Each hero begins with his three attributes, Body, Mind, and X. X varies by genre – in the case of HeroCard Nighmare X is Soul. These three attributes are used to govern the kinds of cards you can bring to play each turn. Each attribute has a numeric value that determines the “strength” of your body, mind or soul.

Every other card in the game has a cost in either Body, Mind or Soul. If you have a Body of 4, for example, you can only have 4 points worth of Body cards on the table at any time.

Three of the cards in your deck are attributes, the remaining cards are actions you can take. The basic card types are attacks, attack mods, special attacks, blocks, block mods, special blocks and miscellaneous cards. The cards are further broken into one of three types, Fast, meaning you can play as many as you want on any action phase (subject to attribute limits), restricted cards which can be played only on your turn but up to the limit of your attribute and Exclusive cards which are the only card you can play on your turn.

The card phase has four basic sections:
Discard as many cards as you like.
Draw up to three cards to fill your hand to its maximum size of seven.
Clear three older cards off the attribute stack.
Play cards.

When you play a card, it is “active” and “in play”. Once the attack made by that card is resolved, it is still “in play” but no longer active. The cost of the cards still counts against your attribute, but it doesn’t provide you any benefit. This can be a powerful factor if you have many cards in play. In addition, some cards derive their power from cards already in play by either the attacker of the defenders.
In the end, the attacking player has an attack strength (combined values of base attack and attack mods) which is compared to the defending player(s) defense strength (combined value of base blocks and block mods). If the attack is greater than the defense, the attacker is the victor otherwise the defender wins.

In the basic HeroCard Duelling game, the players take turns as attacker and defender until someone accumulates a number of victory points based on the number of players.

The other half of the system is a boardgame which uses the dueling system for conflict resolution. The game starts with each player choosing a hero. They are then randomly given a scene card and a killer card. The player to the dealers left then places one scene on the board and each player follows suit. The scenes are hexagonal with three entrances. At least one entrance must point to an existing tile as they are played. Once all the scenes are out the killers are placed and finally the dreamer is placed. The game is now ready to begin.

In Nightmare, the turn order is slightly changed:
Discard cards.
Draw up to three cards to fill your hand with 7 cards.
Move the dreamer, monsters or scenes.
Attack to scare or attack to kill.

Basically you use the dueling system as conflict resolution. During the move section, you are able to move the dreamer (which represents all the players), the killers and the scene tiles for one action each. You get three actions (moves) each turn.. Players and killers may move one square for each move action and must use doors. Scenes can be moved as long as they have 3 contiguous sides which aren’t touching another scene.

To find out what people have as killers and scenes, you must make an attack to scare. An attack to scare affects all the players at once. The active player plays an attack and the other players may join either side (attack or defense). If the attack succeeds, any players who are afraid (because the dreamer is in their scene or their killer is in the scene, they have to reveal that they are afraid (but not what of) and discard their entire hand and draw a new one.

Eventually, you should be able to narrow down each players killer and scene. Once you think you know what someone’s scene and killer are, you can move the dreamer and killer to their scene and make an attack to kill using the HeroCard resolution system. If you succeed and are right, then that player is eliminated. The killer and scene are also removed from play. If your attack doesn’t succeed or you are wrong, then there is no effect.

The game continues until only one player remains.

Observations
The game combines the deductive elements of Clue with some interesting bluffing mechanics. For instance, if someone attacks to scare with a scene and killer that doesn’t matter to you, you could choose not to block which might reveal some information or you could choose to block in order to mislead them. There is a fair amount of psychology in blocking and attacking. The deductive elements are still there, since you need to gradually eliminate choices until you can make a guess about which scene and killer will affect a particular player.

It can also lead to some interesting strategies, since it may be that you only know which scene or killer they are afraid of because it’s not that one that you are afraid of. Attacking to kill may eliminate them, but it may also help another player isolate your scene and killer as well.

In our three games, it appeared that Will was a bit more powerful than the other three characters, but that might have been partly caused by inexperience with the HeroCard system. It could be that with more time other characters would have been more effective. Luckily for us, the player who used Will was not a particularly astute detective, so he tended to provide more information to us than he gathered for himself.

Player elimination can be a fairly brutal mechanic, but usually by the time you are able to start eliminating players, you have a pretty good idea how to eliminate all of them, so the downtime typically isn't very long for the eliminated player.

Recommendation
Overall, I think this is a great game. It combines pretty decent card play with a neat deductive mechanism and some cool bluffing elements. If you like bluffing or deduction games, I think this one could be a lot of fun and it’s out just in time for Halloween, where it could be the surprise hit of a horror-themed game night.

Hiccup? That sounds like the stuff of real nightmares to me... Made me shiver to think about being put in that situation...

Loved your review. Think I might pick this one up for Halloween.