A deeper dive into the unconscious

🧠Unconscious Mind looks magnificent and its theme is unique and integrated very well - but in this post we are here to go deeper into gameplay details. 🕵️ The primary mechanics in the game are worker placement (using speech tokens on a meeting board), there is contract fulfillment as you need to turn in resources to get therapy points to heal your clients, plus resource management is a constant focus. All of these have some unique twists and sprinkled in bonuses to make them a lot better than they may sound at first. 😉

There are limited spots on the meeting board for your speech bubble 🗨️ workers and you also have to point them at the action you want to do. You can choose to double up on workers and do an action twice, which is important as you cannot do the same action again later from another spot until you recall every token. This is already pretty clever but the real fun comes from the inkpot ✒️ on your player board: ☝️ depending on which row you chose on the meeting board, you will move your inkpot around in a loop, and depending on where it lands you activate a row or column of your notebook 📔 tiles on your player board which give you even more actions (mostly resources). Getting these notebook tiles is an important type of action.

Resource management itself is quite fun. 🙃 You have a dial divided into 3 parts for the 3 types of resources, and these are divided into 3 value tiers. As you play you don’t just get resources, but get opportunities to upgrade or change them and sometimes you have to downgrade them as a cost. So it’s all quite fluid and flexible. 

To treat patients 💚 you draft dream cards that show a cost and some rewards. This is why you are gathering resources. The fun part is that the grief you cure and the dreams you use to cure it give different bonuses, and you unlock ongoing abilities from patients at the same time.

There is so much going on, it's hard to describe it all. You can publish research cards and organize them into treatises, and the Vienna rondel gives little actions depending on how many meeples there are or how many matching symbols you have. And a lot more. Then there's a bunch of expansion modules too! 😮