Deep Dreams

• Designer: Santiago Zanon
• Publisher: DEVIR
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 8+
• Time: 10 min
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

 Little Bruno has gone to sleep and will travel during the night between dreams. Our mission as dream guardians is to keep him immersed in the most pleasant dreams and assure us that he wakes up as little as possible during the night.

The goal in Deep Dreams is to score points playing and connecting dream cards, that show the four colors of the dream. You will need to create the largest color groups connected to score victory points, while making sure Bruno doesn’t wake up by drawing a continuous path with the white lines and arrows through the cards. Some dream cards got powerful effects that will help players to get better combinations. And at the end, the longest path will have the greatest reward. Get ready to enter the world of dreams and ensure that Bruno has a quiet and peaceful night.

The deck of 54 cards is shuffled and each player is dealt a hand of 5 cards.  The sleep cards have different colored areas on them and one or more sleep paths.  On a turn, the active player either plays a card or draws a card from the deck.

When you play a card, you create a row of cards in front of you.  The first card starts the row, but all other cards must be played to the far right end of your row UNLESS the card has a player choice symbol in the upper left, in which case it can be played at either extreme end of your row.  Cards must be played adjacent to a previously played card and at least one arrow on your card must connect to a sleep path on the card next to it.

If you connect two sets of arrows when playing your card, you draw a card from the deck to add to your hand. If you have two black arrows connected, you score a point.  If you connect an arrow to an effect icon, you activate that icon.  Examples include:

• Taking an extra turn
• Steal a random card from an opponent
• Eliminate a card from an opponents row
• Double the value of this card when scoring

The game ends when any player has 10 cards in their row; play to the end of the current round so that all players have the same number of turns.  Players now calculate their score:

• Sleep Path – the player with the longest Sleep Path for Bruno (that is a line with Bruno on every card in the path) scores 5 points.  3 points to the second longest path
• Dream Groups – for each of the four (non-white) colors, 4 points to the player with the largest group in that color, 2 points to second largest
• Black Arrows – each player scores 1 point for each pair of black arrows connected to each other

The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most connected black arrows.

My thoughts on the game

Devir seems to be keeping up with their stark dichotomy of games.  Either you’re getting a super crunchy 2+ hour game in a 30 cm box, or you’re getting a small box with a family weight game inside.    Deep Dreams is a nice little card game where you try to massage your cards into creating the best possible path for your little sleeping buddy. 

There are just enough things going on with the cards to give you a reasonable decision on every turn.  Do you want to extend one of the blocks of a color?  Do you want to get some black arrows to meet each other?  Do you want to activate an icon on a previously played card?

Having a hand of five cards feels just right in terms of giving you enough options to choose from while keeping the overall decision space for a turn down to a reasonable time frame.  For the most part, you only consider continuing your card row to the right – I try to put all the choice cards to the left of my hand to remind me to look at both the left and right when considering them.

The game takes up much less of the box than you would think.  While there is room for two decks of cards – the game is seriously multilingual, with rules in 5 languages as well as a full complement of player aids in all of the languages for all of the players!

The game reminds me a lot of NEOS because of the lines that are formed by the cards, but this seems to be better for families and kids due to the welcoming art and the less abstract look of the whole game.  A perfectly fine filler for a game night – the whole thing plays in just 5-10 minutes!

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor