Alongside Sigmund Freud

🧠Unconscious Mind is set in 1900s Austria, and players are contemporaries of Sigmund Freud, pioneers of psychoanalysis, a study of the mind. This theme really comes alive 😍 - the worker placement board is a meeting table of the Wednesday Psychological Society, your screen printed meeples travel around in Vienna, your patients have transparent cards layered over them that show their grief, and you use dream cards to help them overcome their problems. I think it is safe to say that this is one of the most thematic euros out there if you let yourself immerse in it. @fantasia_boardgames also went all-in on aesthetics, so we have Vincent Dutrait illustrating the real world, and Andrew Bosley illustrating the dreams, and it is just as amazing as you’d think. Seeing two of our favorite artists in a single game is phenomenal. 🥰 

But it doesn’t end at theme and graphics, the gameplay is there to back it all up. ☝️ The very core of the game is actually contract-fulfillment, as dream cards show costs you can pay to move the therapy marker of your patients as you heal them - a mechanic that I normally find bland and monotonous, but here there are so many things adding up that you might not even realize it is contract fulfillment. Every decision and action is deeply layered and interconnected, and there are multiple ways you can gather or do things.

Resource management is interesting, as you can upgrade, downgrade and transfer your different Insights on your circular board. Patients you cure and treatises you write give you ongoing effects, and you can fill up your board with notebook tiles so you can trigger even more bonuses. The action selection itself is sublime, and I’ll go into more detail why in a follow-up post. 😁

💭We first played Unconscious Mind at SPIEL22, and back then I announced it game of the year for the year it releases. However after 2 years of anxious waiting we do have some mixed feelings - while the game is absolutely solid and we immensely enjoy quite a few aspects of it, we do feel it is not as perfect as we anticipated.🤔 Nevertheless I can’t wait to play again in the evening today.🤩