I had a deja vu...

🌙Deja Vu: Fragments of Memory is the game that sparked the idea of yesterday’s post. It’s a pretty unknown title that we bought off Ebay, basically just liking the cover and hearing one good opinion about it. It has been sitting 2 full years on the shelf, until we randomly decided to play. And what a surprise it was. 🤩 Let me spoil the best part: it uses the Mancala mechanic! 😁

It’s a pretty abstract game, but the theme is that a nameless girl awakens not remembering anything, and she’s trying to retrieve her lost memories. 👤
As you start out you randomly assemble the game board out of tiles, making sure each one touches at least 2 others. Then you fill all of these up with a Memory Fragment and 4 wooden pieces (Impressions) each.

On your turn you can move the Nameless Girl meeple and potentially gather a Memory Fragment - these are worth points, but only if you get scoring cards for them. Your main part of the turn has to do with the aforementioned Mancala: ☝️ you take all Impression pieces from a tile, and then start placing them one by one on neighboring tiles, then finally collecting the last one you place and all the same colored pieces from that last tile. You use these Impressions to play cards from your hand, which will make up your tableau.

There are some cool things to consider: You have limited storage, so you ideally have to use up Impressions, and you can’t have many in-progress cards. 🧐 If you use Impressions in the color of the card, you also get bonus points.

Cards in your tableau will make you more versatile: more steps to move, more storage for pieces, bigger hand size, etc. Though you can play any card you want, cards of same color make up panorama pictures: if you have a set of them, they will be worth bonus points. So there are a bunch of things you want to optimize, while at the same time being restricted by the Mancala collection mechanic.

You play until someone has 10 cards in their tableau, then the game ends and you score points to see who won - though there is also a co-op and solo mode which we haven’t tried. All in all this is a quick and clever game that deserves a lot more recognition! ☺️