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Unicorn vs Nightmares
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About the game
Every night a nightmare monster tries to get into a child's dream, and the only thing standing in the way is a rainbow of unicorns. Unicorn vs Nightmares is a board game that you play against the monster on a small map of zones joined by paths. Your castle, a heart, sits at the bottom; the monster's camp sits at the top. Reach the other side, or hold enough stars, and you win the board.
On each turn you do one of two things: place a unicorn tile on a free zone, or draw two more tiles. There are five kinds. Pink, number 1, is the weakest but the only one that can cover the strongest. Yellow lets you draw two more. Green gives you a second move. Purple discards one of the monster's tiles. Red, number 5, is the strongest of all and only pink can cover it. A bigger number covers a smaller one, and you never lose to a bad draw, only to a bad move.
The rule people miss is the line. A chain of your tiles has to start at your castle: cut it anywhere and everything past the cut turns pale and stops counting, stars included. The monster plays by the same rule, and it always gets one full turn to try to steal your stars back. Stars decide the boards that you can't win by a straight run.
A night is eight boards: a cloud sky that doubles as the tutorial, then worlds such as a candy desert, a lily pond and a marshmallow volcano in a random order, and then the game is over. There are no lives. Win all eight and the night is yours, lose one and the run ends there. The monster plays carelessly at first and sharpens board after board.
Raphael designed the game, a young player with ideas about unicorns and dreams, and it was built with help from his father and an AI coding assistant. Everything is drawn with canvas paths and every sound is generated while you play.
Playing it here
Click Play, click once on the title screen and pick Tutorial to learn the rules on the first board, or Start Now to go straight to the night. A box tells you how many stars you need on each board; tap it to begin. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click / tap a tile in your hand | pick the unicorn to place |
| Click / tap a spot on the board | place the picked tile there |
| Draw +2 button | take two new tiles instead of placing one |
| Speaker button or M | mute and unmute |
| ? button | show the help |
A few things worth knowing
Protect the chain. A cut near your castle makes a whole branch worthless. Before you play, look at what the monster could cover or discard.
Keep a pink tile in reserve. It is the one tile that beats the red, and it rescues a lost line.
The last star is the hard one. The monster gets one turn after you reach the star count, so make the stars safe before you count on them.
Credits and licence
Unicorn vs Nightmares was created by Raphael and Luca and is released under the MIT licence. The licence text is linked from this page, and the source code is on GitHub.