Unconscious Mind first caught my eye for its unique theme: you embody a psychologist and open a practice to cure patients, publish research to burnish you credentials, follow the foot steps of Dr Freud to become the most renowned psychoanalyst of your generation. It was billed to me as a medium to heavy game, fairly challenging to bring to the table without the right crowd and a healthy chunk of time, but also one that was critically acclaimed by the hobby. My gaming group was up to the challenge!
1-4
120mn
12+
Setup: There are many moving pieces. If you've never played a heavy game, it may feel pretty intimidating; here's the skinny:
- Each player manages its own area which include:
- A rondel board (aka, player board), which tracks your notebooks and "ideas" (a worker to be placed); notebooks are essentially a resource building engine.
- A radial board (aka, insight dial), which holds the resources used for psychoanalyzing patients
- Your office, which holds up to 2 patients in treatment
- Later in the game, one last area will hold your publications
- There are 2 main boards:
- The "meeting" board, ie, this game's take on worker placement, where players get to use their ideas tokens to lock a spot and work in some way (write notebook, gain insight to cure a patient, research & publish, etc.)
- The "Vienna" board, which thematically is where you'll spend your time when you run out of ideas (or coffee, another resource!)
- Lastly, you have an area with multiple cards available for pickup over time:
- patient cards, paired with latent dream cards, which provide rewards as you clear them
- research cards and treatise tiles, which is another route to gain rewards
- Goal tiles, which change every games, and are essentially milestones that rewards the first achiever and moves the game closer to its conclusion
It's a lot to take in, so I wouldn't recommend cold jumping into the game; at minimum one person needs to have a pretty thorough read of the rulebook or you might doom the game before it begins. Beyond the initial setup, there is also a lot of icons to get familiar with too, so ideally every player should at least skim the rules once, unless you have a very patient and dedicated teacher at the table (we did).
Gameplay: Once you start playing, the actions and the components start making a lot more sense and the game opens up. To keep it simple, it comes down to 3 type of actions:
- Use your ideas, ie, place an idea token on the meeting board
- Rest, ie, reclaim your ideas from the meeting board and take an action on the Vienna board
- Cure a patient
These actions each have their own mechanics and are better suited for different goals / strategies, but overlap in some way, with potential chain reactions. There isn't just a lot of things to do but also lot of ways to do them. The goal tiles may initially steer you one way, but as the meeting board fills up, your best option may not be available to you; at times, you may want to delay rest to keep the meeting board locked up. While the Vienna board is inconspicuous, it acts as a multiplier to your reputation (aka, victory points) and triggers the end game, so you'll ignore it at your own risks. And research feels initially underwhelming, but can snowball quickly and literally pays dividends to the more prolific players.
The "best" strategy will feel very elusive on a first playthrough; it doesn't get in the way of fun as there is a constant sense of progress as you discover the mechanics of the game. The game rewards efficient early turns and engine building, potentially making most plays a combo feast.
Theme: The theme is really atypical. On one hand, psychoanalysis isn't really the idea most people have of a fun board game, and it doesn't benefit from the type of tried and true tropes that are typically leveraged to smooth the learning curve. On the other hand, why not? It's a breath of fresh air, leverages ideas closer to real life than fiction, and pops out of the store shelf as the odd duck in the flock. The theme doesn't quite overcome the complexity of the game mechanics (you will likely fumble a bit on your 1st playthrough), but makes them easier to internalize The art is beautiful, quaint and clean, on point with the theme, and while there are a lot of icons to memorize, they are distinct and streamlined efficiently so that their meaning is deceptively easy to understand.
Impression: Getting into the Unconscious Mind is a little daunting without a guiding hand. The 12+ recommended age (12+) and duration (60-120mn) feel pretty optimistic: most pre-teen won't have the kind of patience required for this, and my game group took closer to 150-180mn on average, including setup time. But this game has a lot to offer, each playthrough felt different and offered its own memorable moments. After the 1st playthrough, it unfolded much more like a competitive race for fame, and I could foresee the game setup and duration getting much shorter. I liked this game a lot. I also think it's a hard one to get to the table: it doesn't really have casual players in mind and feels significantly heavier then advertised. With a curious and patient group, discovering the game and its mechanics is a rewarding experience. Once you're in the know, it remains truly enjoyable with evenly experienced players, but very lopsided and potentially deflating with newer players.
TLDR: A rich game with competitive appeal and replayable value for the right crowd
Score: 7.5/10
Cheers,
Ady
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