Let's go back in time

🧠 Unconscious Mind is the newest upcoming game from Fantasia Board Games - it is set in early 1900 Vienna, at the dawn of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement and you play as a member of Sigmund Freud's group, the Wednesday Psychoanalytic Society. To win the game you need to master therapeutic techniques, establish your practice and publish your knowledge! Along the way you help patients recover from various traumas or complexes by delving into their dreams.

We played a demo at SPIEL, and we have to say: this game is already our candidate for best euro of 2023! 🤩

🗨️ It is primarily a worker placement game. Each turn you place one or more of your markers on the action board and activate an adjacent spot that many times. You can’t activate the same action again until you rest and recover your markers. There is quite an awesome additional twist: depending on which row you pick, you move your inkpot marker 1-3 spaces on the rondel of your player board. Wherever it lands, it activates the row of bonus tiles previously placed there; or unlock additional workers. You could forgo unlocking a worker to activate a column of bonus tiles instead. This makes worker placement a multi-layered decision, and gives amazing opportunities for engine building.

🗨️ The actions include getting these bonus tiles, acquiring or upgrading different resources, drawing or playing book cards representing your research papers, or moving your professor meeple around on the Vienna-rondel, activating historical locations (twice, if you meet up with Freud).

❤️‍🩹 You can heal patients if you forgo the inkpot movement by spending resources listed on their dream cards. By doing so, you earn victory points and move the heart token of your patient. If you reach a golden space, you remove the transparent overlay card that represents traumas of the patient earning you additional bonuses. Completely healing them provides an ongoing rule-bending passive effect. After healing a patient, you pick a new one with one chosen and one random dream card.

The game has a lot more tiny details which I can’t fit in here anymore, a more detailed description is on its way to BGG😉 And look at the artwork!