Nightmare (Atmosfear series)

Nightmare is an interactive horror board game first released in 1991 by A Couple A Cowboys and J. W. Spear and Sons, designed by Brett Clements and Phillip Tanner as part of the Atmosfear series and built around a videotape that runs alongside the physical board. The two to six players each take on one of six supernatural personas, called Harbingers, including a werewolf, a poltergeist, a mummy, a zombie, a witch, and a vampire, all trapped in a realm called the Other Side. Before play begins each player privately writes down their own greatest fear on a slip of paper, which is shuffled in among the other players' fears and placed unseen. Players move around the board collecting keys that match their character's color while a menacing host on the videotape, the Gatekeeper, periodically interrupts to help or hinder them on a roughly sixty-minute running clock. A player wins by gathering all six of their own keys, reaching the center of the board, and drawing another player's written fear from the pile; if the full videotape runs out before anyone succeeds, the Gatekeeper is declared the winner instead. The game's blend of a fixed-length VHS or DVD component with physical board play made it a distinctive party game of its era.