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Review: HeroCard Nightmare |  |
For those who have been reading this blog with any regularity, it should be no secret that I’m a fan of the HeroCard series of games that TableStar Games publishes. I enjoy the basic card battle system mechanics, and I’ve liked each of the five HeroCard games that have come out so far. It is with some trepidation, therefore, that I write this review, for their latest game, HeroCard Nightmare.
Nightmare is a bit of a departure from previous HeroCard games in a number of different ways. Like Cyberspace, there are no expansion packs; all four Hero decks come in the core box, and it’s playable for one to four players right out of the box. It’s also a deduction game at heart. The premise of the game is that you and your fellow players have been trapped inside somebody’s nightmare by a magic camera, along with five killers. Each player knows which killer will be his killer, and in which scene of the dream he will die. The goal is to find out who’s going to kill everyone else and where they’ll die, then arrange things so that their deaths come to pass. The last one standing gets to escape from the dream (though, thematically, it’s never really clear why this is).
The mechanics of the board game, itself, are fairly simple and, I think, fairly solid. There are seven scene tiles and five killer figures, along with a Dreamer figure which represents all of the players. During your turn you can move any of these things, reshaping the dream, moving the Dreamer, and moving the killers so that you can create the combination you want. When the Dreamer occupies the scene you want to know about, and is with any killers you want to know about, you can attack to scare. This is resolved using the basic HeroCard rules, with a twist: your attack is not directed at anyone in particular. As such, anyone can choose to defend, and the other players can choose to join in on either the attacking side or the defending side, provided they choose the side currently losing. If your attack succeeds, if anyone has either the scene card for the appropriate scene or an appropriate killer card, those players have to announce that they are scared. By paying attention to who is scared when, and who blocks or attacks when, you can use process of elimination to figure out what combinations will prove lethal for your fellow players. At this point you can attack to kill–a more straightforward HeroCard duel–with success removing the other player from the game. Last man standing wins.
As I’ve said, I think that the basic mechanics are sound. I like the theme and the way you re-arrange the dream to your liking, and I like the cutthroat deduction mechanic. My main problem is with the way the HeroCard system is implemented in the game, particularly in regards to attacking to scare.
Problem number one: attacks to scare tend to take a while, as each player deliberates on whether or not they want to contribute, and how much. Each player has to pass in succession for an attack to end and, in my experience, attacks can take as long as five minutes (as compared to the speedy, forty-second affairs of other HeroCard games). When each player’s turn takes five minutes (and players will be attacking to scare a lot), the game tends to drag.
Problem number two: Relief. There is a mechanic in this game when there are three or more players termed ‘Relief’. In effect, after an attack sequence is resolved, the winning side gets to either draw three cards or clear three cards. I understand why this mechanic is in place; since there’s a chance that everyone will be either attacking or blocking on everyone else’s turn, players need lots of cards and need to keep their Attribute Stacks fairly clear. The problem is that this mechanic destroys the balance of the system. Each HeroCard game has had at least one ‘basic deck’, a Hero who has few complicated abilities and relies primarily on one or two high-value attacks and blocks that use up an entire Attribute Stack (or nearly that, at least). As the system is designed this is balanced, because throwing yourself wholly into an attack like that leaves you open to an opponent’s attack, and using a high-cost block could make it more difficult to attack. There are trade-offs. In Nightmare, the Relief mechanic allows you to disregard these trade-offs. Will, the basic deck of Nightmare can spend his entire allotment of Body on a single, 9-point base attack, and add on some attack mods, and it’s very difficult for any of the other characters to block. When Will blocks, the same is true in reverse; nobody can get through his defenses. Because he’s likely to win most battles, assuming clear attribute stacks and at least one of these cards (or one of his lesser, but still potent, cards), he’ll almost always get Relief after attacking or blocking, meaning that he can simply clear those cards away (which is easier, since he’s playing only a couple of large cards, rather than several smaller ones like the other characters). Within the Nightmare game, Heroes like Will (or To’a King from Champion of New Olympia, or the Paladin from Orc Wars) are far more powerful than most other characters.
What I Liked: The basic mechanics of the game seem sound, and I like the idea of the game. The tiles and pieces are also of good quality and, viewed in isolation, the characters seem well-designed.
What I Didn’t Like: The HeroCard system just doesn’t work that well in this game. The game feels long and bloated, and not that much fun. I also wasn’t that crazy about the artwork on the cards; they look suspiciously like people from the office were photographed in costume, and then the photographs were Photoshopped later.
The Bottom Line:As I mentioned all the way at the top, I like the HeroCard system. I also like the premise of this game, and the core mechanics. The problem is that they just don’t fit together that well, as written. I’ve liked every HeroCard game that came my way up until this point, but I just can’t get behind this one. The game could be a quick-playing, light deduction game if a different resolution system were used, or if the existing system were simplified somewhat (perhaps by making attacks to scare more like standard HeroCard duels, and by eliminating Relief). As it is, though, it just wasn’t that much fun to play. I really, really hate to say this, but I just can’t recommend this game.
