Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Highly interactive
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
You are The Lone Survivor of last year’s Dead Run Incident, the night when the animals came back from the dead hungering for the brains of humans. Somehow, you escaped the Nightmare Forest before it was overrun by the undead.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Deck / Bag Building
Add new pieces during play to improve the cards, tokens, or dice drawn later.
Hand Management
Time and sequence a limited hand of cards to preserve future options.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Dice Rolling
Roll dice to introduce uncertainty into actions, production, movement, or resolution.
Read the full game description
You are The Lone Survivor of last year’s Dead Run Incident, the night when the animals came back from the dead hungering for the brains of humans. Somehow, you escaped the Nightmare Forest before it was overrun by the undead. After that horrifying experience, you steeled your heart and appointed yourself the investigator of the strange, wild, and unexplained in and around The City. Recently, you saw strange lights hovering outside the City. You gathered a few trusted friends, and headed back to the Nightmare Forest. There you discovered an Alien Expeditionary Force seeking to gather human specimens they can use to conquer the entire planet. You must defeat all the Aliens, without any of your friends being killed and collected, before the Aliens break out of the Forest and wipe out humanity. Can you can survive another journey into the Nightmare Forest? OBJECT OF THE GAME: Nightmare Forest: Alien Invasion is a Cooperative game, where players must work together to cleanse the forest of Aliens before it is too late! Based on the number of characters, you will deal out a grid of Forest Cards. Each turn, every player will move their character(s) around the Forest and decide which Forest Cards to flip over to potentially expose Aliens, fiendish Traps, useful Gear, or valuable Allies. There are four levels of cards, with higher challenges requiring that players choose whether to hope for a lucky roll or to combine their unique Abilities and Gear to improve their chances of defeating powerful foes. To win, you and your friends must stay alive and clear the entire forest before the last turn. If any player is killed, or if the game ends before the Forest is cleared, then the Aliens overrun the City, and destroy humanity.