Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
There comes a point with any new, complex strategy game when I look around the table, absorb the beauty of the incredible components, review my player aid, and try to remember what the heck I had planned to do for my next turn.
Unconscious Mind (2024, Lucky Duck Games) has been an interesting tale of what medium-to-heavy Euro-style strategy games look like nowadays. The final product is gorgeous, with some of the best graphic design and card art created for a game in the last year or two.
In fact, the artwork from the game’s two primary artists—Andrew Bosley (Everdell, Union Stockyards, River Valley Glassworks) and Vincent Dutrait (hundreds of credits, including Tenpenny Parks, Amun-Re: 20th Anniversary Edition, and Heat: Pedal to the Metal)—warrants a special award of its own. This is the reason some people have purchased a copy of Unconscious Mind. It has an investment in production that is rare, even in an age of board game production that is without peer.
But when a person takes their eye off the prize—that is, scoring victory points in a game that has a whole heck of a lot going on—they are likely to find what I have found. Unconscious Mind is an exceptional puzzle, one that features a half-dozen rewarding turns in each play, but a ruleset that occasionally gets in the way thanks to a few edge case rules and abilities that players forget right through the final turn of the game.
That means Unconscious Mind, as a game, is a beautiful toy. As a niche hobbyist endeavor, the game is best for players who are willing to spend a lot of time with it. The “Mind” is a terrible thing to waste for a single play with this game. You’re going to want to invest 4-5 plays into this one in order to see the magic.
“I Didn’t Think It Would Be on the Heavier Side of ‘Medium-Heavy’”
For this review, I completed three plays of Unconscious Mind: a four-player game, a three-player game, and one solo play. My second play was the three-player game, and the two players I enlisted for service had questions.
“How long is this going to take?” one asked, as they were scouting their options during a recent game night.
“Probably two hours,” I said. “You’re looking at a teach of 30-40 minutes upfront, though.”
The two men looked at each other; it was a weeknight, and they had a bedtime to consider. “What do you think, weight-wise?” (This is a common question with the players in my Wednesday group…we usually take on lighter fare for that game night, so people always want to know how much brain power will be required to sit through a long teach after a longer workday.)
“Medium-heavy. Definitely not medium,” I responded, hopeful that they would take the bait.
One of the two wanted to flex the brain muscles, so thanks to the fact that these two came to game night together, they jumped in. I did a somewhat hurried 30-minute teach, then we took our time navigating the space, in a playtime that wrapped at the two-hour, 15-minute mark, just a tad over my initial guesstimate. That meant our game wrapped up by 10 PM, which aligned with the other players’ original thoughts on bedtime.
As we were packing up, one of the two players had thoughts. “If I’m being honest, Unconscious Mind was on the heavy side of medium. I liked it, but I need to play it again to really understand what was going on in there.”
It is that statement—“Unconscious Mind is on the heavy side of medium”—that is now my guiding light when considering the game. The game’s many complexities require investment in a world where a lot of players want to jump in, try a game, then try a different game next week. Or an older game from their collection that they already know well. Unless Unconscious Mind becomes a part of your regular gaming habits for a solid stretch early in its lifecycle (say, 3-4 times in the span of a month), I think it’s ruleset and the winning strategies will fade quickly.
That would be a shame, because it is a beautiful puzzle.
The Mind
Unconscious Mind is a 1-4 player action selection game that plays in about 40 minutes per player. Covering the rules would take about 45 minutes in real time (such is the length of the Gaming Rules! official rules video), so I’ll try my best to briefly give you a sense of what is going on.
It’s the early 1900s, the dawn of the theories behind psychoanalysis. In an era where Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud is making waves with his treatises on the “unconscious mind”, competing theories from key contemporaries such as Alfred Adler, Sabina Spielrein, and Carl Jung are collectively pushing the world forward. Players take on the roles of these key contemporaries in a race to prove themselves as the most distinguished rival thought leader of the era, next to Freud, of course.
Just the theme alone drew me in when I initially connected with the team at Lucky Duck to secure a copy of this game. It’s just totally different from many of the dry (some might even say “dusty”) Euros I play often. I love that Freud always “wins” the game…during play, everyone attempts to boost their reputation by taking actions, and every time a player gains reputation, a marker showing Freud’s reputation also barrels towards a finish line that triggers the end of the game. (Ultimately, it feels like Freud won in real life, too.)
Gameplay is, on the surface, very simple. Players either take an action (State Ideas) on one of the game’s two main boards; recall their action tokens, which are naturally ideas or, they treat one or both of the two clients who are currently in their office. Clients provide the bulk of the game’s scoring, and since you are supposed to be a psychologist of some renown, it feels right that you should be spending most of your time with these individuals.
This final action, formally known as Treat Clients, is also the main reason why I recommend trying Unconscious Mind at least once.
Each time a player takes on a new patient, they add either a Routine client or a Case-Study client. The difference is straightforward: Routine clients provide game-changing ongoing powers, while Case-Study clients conditionally boost end-game scoring. That distinction is a puzzle that I’ve loved every time I have played the game, especially getting the balance right between powers and points.
Clients are selected from a small market of two patient options per client type. Each client card has a translucent plastic card layered on top, a plastic card that is drawn randomly from a sleeve nestled to the side of each client deck.. These cards—think the plastic overlays from games like Canvas or Dead Reckoning—are known as “Grief Layers” and position the client as troubled, deeply conflicted individuals.
Then, a player adds a treatment card from the Latent Dream deck (a blind, top-deck draw) before adding a second card, a Manifest Dream card, from a face-up market, on top of the Latent Dream. These two cards represent the two rounds of treatment each client must go through before being cured.
The imagery on these cards…oh my goodness, these cards are exceptional. If anything, I wish Unconscious Mind had more Latent and Manifest Dream cards in their respective decks. These tarot-sized cards created out-loud “OMG” moments during my plays. The dream images range nicely, with many stunners across the 48 cards in those two decks. A couple are haunting, some reminded me of the best images from games like Mysterium or Dixit, and many created moments where players tried to posit a title for each image before placing them above their office boards.
Combined with the therapy needed from the base client card value—shown in values of green hearts on the bottom of a card—these Grief Layers require players to get their clients through Catharsis before being fully healed. (As one player noted, it’s a little strange that the game implies that any client would be fully healed in a game like this in real life. Let’s agree that therapy might never truly end. But, this IS a board game, so there’s that.) The Catharsis step allows a player to remove the Grief Layer from a patient, and further treatment scores victory points and allows for a player to later add new clients to their two-office suite.
The Meeting Table
Scores in Unconscious Mind drive mainly from points earned for curing patients, both in game and for the Case-Study client end-game conditions. But most of the turn-to-turn action during play is tied to a healthy amount of action tableau building and recipe fulfillment.
I found that mileage really varied here. Everyone who I invited to try the game enjoyed the Treat Clients option. However, State Ideas was a mixed bag. That’s because players use a small, circular side board near their play area called the Insight board to track the collection of the things you will need to later treat your clients.
The game uses an interesting mechanic to tie this together, by having players place idea tokens on the Meeting Table board to trigger effects (one or two effects per turn), then using an over-the-top, beefy token known as the Inkpot to trigger movement on each player’s personal board to trigger various rows of the action tableau (known as the Notebook), more bonuses and resource conversions to wrap up a turn.
It is here where the game’s theme melts away a bit, to reveal a version of games ranging from Splendor to Sidereal Confluence: turn these insights into better insights, or turn this “bright idea” token into a coffee, or something else that is the result of a sexy engine. A solid half, maybe two-thirds, of each game became specifically this process. That also means that engine-building Euro fans can rejoice! Unconscious Mind has a lot of these moments, as players “elevate” certain insights into better ones, or “suppress” an insight in one flavor to elevate two insights in other areas.
That also leads to a criticism of Unconscious Mind. I think it plays best at two, maybe three players, because downtime can be high without any interaction. These sorts of “run my engine” games are fun for me, but not with the added weight of watching three other players run their engine while I wait 10+ minutes to take my next turn. Some of the combos here are appropriately juicy, but without the payoff that comes from watching someone else move their Insight gems around while I twiddle my thumbs.
I also found that the limitations of the Meeting Table appeared as players spent their time not taking recall actions. Players begin the game with only three idea tokens, but can earn as many as three additional permanent idea tokens and an unlimited number of “bright idea” tokens, which can be substituted for the permanent tokens to take actions. That’s all well and good, until the Meeting Table spaces are completely full, and other players find that there’s no reason to do a recall action if they have enough other ways to get the resources they need to treat their patients.
That led to a healthy amount of action blockades. The game’s design also limits the ability to take the same action repeatedly without a recall action, so finding ways to take the actions I really wanted was a good challenge. But sometimes I just need to grab three wheat and two ore to complete a city (or, in this game, two minor Passion insights and a major Freedom insight to remove the Grief Layer, for example). Slowing that process down for rules’ sake was occasionally a drag.
There’s So Much Here!
Unconscious Mind is good. Occasionally, it is really good. And even though I have completed just three plays, I could see myself playing this ten more times and still finding different ways to attack its system. In a field crowded with hundreds of entries in the medium-to-heavy strategy game genre every year that’s a good sign.
And I haven’t even come close to telling you everything. There are research actions that allow players to write treatises—or better, to “cite” (borrow) the ideas of other players’ treatises to benefit both parties. There are seven public milestones, offering a chance to achieve a round of mid-game parity on the reputation track. There’s a completely separate board showing six locations in the city of Vienna, using a tag system to help players looking for another way to gather Insights and make resource conversions outside of the Meeting Table. Some the powers on the Routine client cards come close to breaking the game—in a fun way—that already have me hunting certain clients when they appear on the market.
The base game includes three minor expansions that provide a chance to supercharge scoring opportunities. For example, Fireworks adds a token that reduces the cost to earn a district bonus during a player’s recall action. The Journalist adds a figure that boosts the chances to take more actions at the Journalist’s city board location, which might be very valuable in the back half of each play.
And that’s before we talk about all the expansions that shipped with the deluxe version of Unconscious Mind. Nightmares and Free Association are the two major expansions delivered to backers, and they add so many combinations of ways to play the base game that it blew my mind when I read through those rulebooks. (You see what I did there.) By the time I discovered pets are an option in the Nightmares module, I wondered why there were so many extra goodies for players to work through. (Ahh, right. Money.)
Unconscious Mind is not perfect. I struggled with the game at the full player count, and there are some edge-case rules that just feel like they exist solely to interrupt a good time. (I’m looking at you, weird citation of opposing player treatise rule making players steal ideas from right to left!) This game is a bit of a bear to teach, and whipping it out on the fly as a random game to play on game night proved quite a challenge. I already know that this has to hit the table once a quarter with a consistent group, otherwise, it will fade to the back of the line, with so many other easier-to-table games waiting in the wings.
But those are problems for another day. Unconscious Mind was worth the wait and I’m already excited to see what additional content will come our way in the years to follow. The design team behind this game (Jonny Pac, Laskas, Yoma, and Antonio Zax) put in the work, and it shows!
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