Designed by Shou Aoyama, Yukio Shimami and Yuso Taya, Chainsomnia is a light easy-to-play cooperative dungeon crawler for 2-4 players, and with a solitaire option. You play as children who have been captured in their sleep by a demon, but the children each have their own special ability.
You need to work through several rooms before you can wake up and escape but every time you move to a new room tile you encounter an event card. A few of these give a positive boost but the majority are negative and spawn nightmares which players need to resolve by meeting their dice roll tests. To beat the demon and win the game, you need to get a player to the 'wake up' tile but you must also have dealt with all the nightmares. The nightmare deck also functions as a game timer: you lose if you haven't escaped before the deck runs out.
Characters need to work together, not least because they can become increasingly immobilised with chains, which represent fear increasingly gripping their souls. As this fear increases, it reduces in most cases the number of actions that character can take. By contrast, there is one character whose rising fear makes her run faster so increases the number of actions she can take but, like the others, if the chain on her is completed she will be completely immobilised, so you may be pushing your luck elevating her anxiety.
Chainsomnia is an entertaining cooperative game that you can play, win or lose, comfortably in around 45 minutes. Just be warned that for some players the mismatch of a game with cute-looking infant protagonists may seem an incongruous fit with a theme involving demonically enchained souls.
Chainsomnia is published by Japanime Games and Delightworks.