Dreamworld comes to us from the same publisher as Unconscious Mind, Fantasia Games, and was a small-box add-on game for its Gamefound crowdfunding campaign. It was designed by Jonny Pac who also worked on Unconscious Mind and displays the same gorgeous artwork from Andrew Bosley, Vincent Dutrait and Yoma.
Dreamworld is a lightweight quick-playing card game for 2–4 players. It follows the same theme as its parent game, Unconscious Mind. As a follower of Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind, your goal is to help suffering people recover from their psychological traumas. You can foster each client’s healing potential by interpreting the symbolism of their dreams.
At the start of a round, each player chooses a dream card and simultaneously reveals it. Next, you’ll arrange the cards numerically beside the current client. The difference between your card’s number and the next limits how many treatment tokens you may score: the bigger the gap, the better. If you’re the first to complete with all your tokens, it proves your treatments were the most effective – making you Freud’s most formidable contemporary.
Dreamworld’s core mechanisms are managing your hand and card selection to score the largest difference between the next-in-line cards to generate treatment points. Each client is 'treated' twice, once on the sun side (left side) and once on the moon side (right side). You pick your card in secret and reveal it simultaneouslywith the other players, with the hope that you picked the best card. This leads to one of the game's first frustrations but core elements. You never really know what other cards people will pick so you feel often there are few strategic choices. The game is meant to be played tactically but with the need for you to remember somehow what cards have already been played and what might come up. This turns this light game into an intense memory game that just doesn’t feel worth the effort.
The game is meant to be played quickly but, in our multiple plays, every group felt it outstayed its welcome and also finished the game not fully sure if they enjoyed the experience. Sure there are some nice tactical decision spaces, including the ability to play your professor card to get potentially the last choice on what card to play that turn, giving you greater control on your scoring for that round.
One of the game's shining production qualities is its amazing artwork, but this is unimportant to the game and just ignored by players. Every player who played it said that tho' the artwork was great it didn’t add anything to the game. This is such a pity because I feel Fantasia Games missed an opportunity to let the artwork resonate with the gameplay.
Overall Dreamworld was only a small side add-on game to its bigger brother, Unconscious Mind but the team at Boards Eye View felt it might have benefited from a bit more time on the therapist's couch to work through some of its issues.
(Review by David Breaker)