Endless Nightmare has been in my ‘ought to try’ list for what seems like forever. It is a free print and play game that has been around for over a decade. More than that, it’s one that doesn’t require any construction whatsoever. You print out the game board and add a bunch of tokens and die. You are ready.
Unlike a lot of games where you just print off a board, Endless Nightmare is not a Roll and Write. No, it’s a Roll and Move! Which I realize is regarded as the laziest design choice possible, one that has been used for many older games based on IP’s where the goal was to shove out a brand name without any consideration for actual gameplay.
With that being said, as Backgammon has clearly proven, there is room to have a good game with Roll and Move. It all comes down to giving you choices. And to be brutally fair, Endless Nightmare is more of a Push Your Luck game but Roll and Move is a good way to explain it.
In Endless Nightmare, you are trapped in some kind of dreamworld, pursued by a shadow. You will travel through nightmare after nightmare, trying to keep ahead of the shadow. Spoiler, it will inevitably catch you. You are doomed. You are just seeing how long you can put off that doom.
There is actually a decent amount of information on the player board. There is the movement track, where the shadow is chasing you. You also have to track how many nightmares you have survived. You also have two sets of three traits. And you also get to keep track of what nightmare you are in, although you’re going to need a reference sheet to know what its effects are.
The core mechanic is that you decide on an action, which breaks down to either moving or trying to alter a trait. You roll a die and try to roll higher than either how far you want to move or where that trait is. Oh, and you lose ties.
You lose if the shadow catches you or if your courage or sanity drops to zero.
I am not going to go into too much detail, but one of the terribly clever choices the designer made is that your role also is the role for the shadows movement and to determine if horrors or scares increase. Those will drag your sanity or courage down.
I honestly have mixed feelings about the mechanics. The game is all about managing a death spiral, but the game is also an inevitable death spiral. As the game goes on, the difficulty ramps up and your choices mean and less and less because you’re going to fail more and more.
On the other hand, the actual reason to play the game is the theme. The game is dedicated to making you experience an otherworldly horror movie. Every nightmare has some kind of thematic way to make your life even more difficult. And the whole death spiral thing is pretty much locked in by the theme.
Endless Nightmare isn’t a game that I’m going to play on a regular basis. However, it is a game that I can definitely see pulling out at Halloween.