Old Trash Review: Nightmare House

I stumbled upon Ares Magazine near the end of the print run, and picked up two issues before they were all gone. Great concept, a full game in every issue, with the rest of the issue dedicated to the same general theme. As a big fan of horror, I definitely had to get issue #15, which featured Nightmare House.

By the standards of 80s boardgames, Nightmare House was spectacular in appearance. The map is startling, sinister and gorgeous, all at once. Half of the map is of a big haunted house in victorian plum carpeting and wood floors, with a halo of firefly green. The other half of the map is this weird electrical pattern that somehow reminded me of a Tesla coil. The cardboard chits were also interesting, though some were a little hard to read due to odd color contrasts, like blue on black.

The rules were disappointing. Just paragraph after paragraph of technical details. Like the U.S. tax code, every rule came with several specific exceptions. There were no charts or diagrams, just words and words and more words. The overall length of the rules was okay, but the dense wording made them seem longer. In actual play, it's easier to just follow through the rules in order each turn than to try to remember any specific rules.

Still, we played Nightmare House. Back then, there weren't as many horror games by a long shot, so Nightmare House held a strong appeal at first, despite the daunting rules.

Nightmare House is a game for 2-5 players, and takes even an experienced group maybe 3 hours to play. One player is the Entity that haunts the house, and controls the various physical and mental haunts that appear in the night. The other players control 1-4 brave folks who try to exorcise the Entity from the house. Each character has a bit of background and some have a real history with the house, which is a nice touch. If I had designed the game, I would have done miniature character sheets with portraits and listing any rules exceptions involving each character.

Each hero starts with three random pieces of equipment, including the three parts of the exorcism kit: bell, book (Bible) and candle. With less than four players, there is a chance that you will need to get by with incomplete gear, but with four players, you can make sure somebody has the exorcism kit for maximum advantage.

Each turn, the Entity players has the option of investing some of his energy into summoning haunts, which are initially placed on the gnarly clock face on the map. If I remember correctly, the physical haunts take longer to manifest, but the mental haunts will arrive the next turn. The heroes will need to fight or evade these haunts to explore the house, seeking to discover advantages or weak points in the entity's control.

Ultimately, the cool-looking house and the haunts tend to be irrelevant, because the real action takes place on the astral plane, which is the other half of the map. Each juncture of energy lines represents a room in the house, but since the energy lines form concentric circles, the layout of the astral plane is quite different from the house. And since the rooms are represented by chits, the layout of the astral plane can be different every game.

The heroes need to exorcise rooms on the astral plane, while the entity tries to blast them there with pure psychic energy. There are 12 columns of rooms crossing the concentric circles, and the essence of the game depends on how many of these are tainted with evil or cleansed by the heroes. Once enough of the columns are cleared on the astral plane, the heroes have a chance to batter down the inner rings defending the entity and finally cast it out of the house.

And here is the true weakness of Nightmare House: the game is delicately balanced. Once one side or the other gets the upper hand, it's usually just a brutal beatdown from there on out, with only a small chance for the other side to come back into the game. If this was a one hour game, that would be tolerable, but 3+ hours is a long time to taking a beatdown. That, and the unfortunate focus on the astral plane keeps Nightmare House from being one of the great horror boardgames. I think that it's just so-so, but I could see someone else really enjoying it. I still get it out and play it once every several years, and I can't quite bring myself to sell it or trade it.

Nice review. I like the solo play of Nightmare House, although it has been a few years since I have played it.

That issue of Ares also has a good review of Return of the Jedi that properly rakes it over the coals before it became popular to do so. There is also a nice review of The Hunger with David Bowie (directed by Tony Scott).

Nice summary. I remember playing it back in the day and loving the map and the concept of material/astral planes, but the execution definitely fell short. I've occasionally thought about taking a stab the design with more of an emphasis on the physical reality, but now that Betrayal exists, we've got a haunted house game that would be hard to top.