by Ben Bruckart

• Designer: Ivan Lashin
• Artists: Nick Gerts, Evgeny Zubkov
• Publishers: Open Borders Studio and Hobby World
• No. of Players: 2-4
• Duration: About an hour 
• Times Played: 4

So, I am doing my pre-Essen homework which primarily includes combing through tons of hype lists and looking at what my favorite designers have been up to. This year was a little more special for me, as it was my first trip to Essen for Spiel 2024. 

I am now not just buying games, but scrutinizing their sizes, weights, and dimensions, as well as trying to determine if the game is a keeper. I allowed myself a few extra games in my luggage and I came across Ivan Lashin’s new game. I know Ivan as I am a fan of Smartphone Inc. And the Opinionated Gamers have much love for Furnace ( https://opinionatedgamers.com/2024/09/12/dale-yu-review-of-furnace-and-interbellum-expansion/ ), even though I haven’t played it yet.

I wander over to Hobby World, and there is Ivan himself, teaching the game to people. I introduce myself as a fan and Ivan is a big, smiley, humble kind of guy. He greets me with a big hangshake and an enthusiastic smile and we talk about his new game, Neodreams. He even told me that this is his favorite child of the bunch!

What is this game? Well, the theme is there’s a device called the Oneiroshunt that lets you connect a sleeping mind to a machine and a new budding industry of selling skills, new experiences, and all that to sleeping clients. You want to accumulate wealth (points) by gaining clients, selling experiences and improving dreamscapes. I dont need themes! I need gameplay! Directly translated for gamers, the Oneiroshunt is a worker placement board, the cards are dreamscapes, clients are tokens that you can put on certain dreamscapes, and objects are upgrades to the dreamscapes.

Setup:

Setup is quick. Put the Oneiroshunt ((1) in the diagram below) in the middle of the table with the cycle marker (2) at the beginning. There are three decks of cards (Lucid, Neodream, Recursive) that you shuffle and put 2 faceup from each deck to form the display (3). Each player begins with one random card from each deck (11), along with their three acrylic Oneironaut pieces (8), three Object tokens (9), their mainframe board (6) (which doubles as a player aid), and their starting Dreamboard (7) (double sided:  A for beginners or B for a slightly different setup). 

As you can see in the diagram, the Dreamboard has a set of dreamscapes to get you started (One Lucid and one Neodream dreamscape). There’s a pool of way too many Objects and Clients that everyone can use.

There are three types of resources—knowledge, memory and fantasy—that are tracked on the left side of your player board and they start at level 3 (10). The interesting thing here is that fantasy is a wild resource and can be used to pay for knowledge (orange) or memory (green). The person who slept in the latest gets the Active player marker and the player to their right gets the last player marker.

How it plays 

Turns are simple but the choices are great. 

1. You can either place an Oneironaut or Cycle Sleep. 

You have three Oneironauts and if all are placed, you must “Cycle Sleep”.

2. Then you refill the market.

3. Last you check for the Endgame trigger (12 cards played, including your starting two).

As you can see, the board has spaces for twelve Oneironauts. Some of the spaces have multiple actions on them and you can take them in the order of your choice. Once taken, each space is off limits for you and other Oneironauts. 

Phase 1, place an Oneironaut or Cycle Sleep.

The actions are very straightforward. 

With your Oneironaut, you can 

• Gain resources: 

Gain the specified amount of the indicated resource.  You do this by advancing on the tracks on the left side of your mainframe board.

• Draw cards which can act as resources:

• Create cards—that is, play a Dream card from your hand face up into your “Dreamscape” by paying the resources indicated on the card’s upper left corner

• Gain an object token from the reserve.

• Place an object from your personal supply.

When you place objects, you can place any number of them from your personal supply onto the cards, going from top to bottom. Each card (Dreamscape) has default abilities, payouts, conditions that can be upgraded with these objects. For example, the rulebook shows a card that gets better

In the above picture, you can see two rows near the bottom. The Star with the circle and dots around it denotes the upgraded ability, the line above it explains the base ability.

As an example, the green card on the left shows you can upgrade any card. But the upgraded ability allows you do the upgrade but then discard a client from an orange card and gain two in the orange currency.

Cards are really well explained in the rulebook. They have costs, credits (points), discard benefits, and other effects that are well detailed. 

• Link Clients, by placing them on the dreamscapes and getting their big payouts

These are generally bigger one-time rewards. They can occur once per dreamscape unless you can use other abilities to remove the clients from that dreamscape.

• Broadcast Neodreams

This is a little engine building effect that allows you to activate all the Neodreams you have played down in your player area.

If you have no Oneironauts or want to jump ahead, you can “Cycle Sleep” which moves the cycle marker one space across the top row of the board. This is an interesting mechanism that triggers how you get your workers back. 

You get actions on the column that you move to in order of left to right, except at the end it will return to the start (left side). 

Then the players in that column get their workers back and get to perform a “Returnal Action”, which corresponds to the row they had placed their worker. Top row is Lucid (Orange), Middle row is Neodream (Pink), and Bottom Row is Recursive (Green). You can either take a card of that respective type or play a card. The genius of this action is it really can happen simultaneously, keeping the game moving at a good clip.

There is one additional thing you can do at any time and as often as you want:  you can discard cards receiving a benefit from the top right side of the card. This can either be an additional resource or bonus marker most of the time. So, collecting a big hand of cards is another way of getting more resources.

Phase 2: Refill the market so there are two face up cards of each deck.

Phase 3, check to see if anyone has 12 or more cards.

Final scoring is easy. Add up the points from cards/Dreamscapes (top middle), Objects placed on cards are one point each, and then unspent resources, unplaced objects, and cards in hand are summed up and divided by 5 to get your final score.

My thoughts:

This is a solid medium Eurogame. I liked that it moved along at a good pace. All my games have finished in under an hour and turns are simple, the only slow down being to read and look at cards in more detail. The acrylic pieces are nice.

How was the rulebook? Really really good! It’s not a super complicated game but I really enjoyed my plays and as questions have come up, the rulebook has been great to reference and find answers to. It comes with good explanations, examples, and is clearly delineated on the types of actions.

The art got people to make several comments in my games about how fantastic it was. The Dreamscape cards show really beautiful and fantastic scenes. There is low interactivity between players, with the Cycle Sleep action the only thing people are watching for to see if they get their Oneironaut(s) back, so it felt a bit multiplayer solitaire where you maybe just waited for someone to finish their action. This is probably why its recommended best with two players. But it’s not a big deal, since the actions are not super long or complex, although they can have some cascading abilities based on different card combinations.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers:

Dale Y: Well, I have played this a few times more since my review earlier this year (https://opinionatedgamers.com/2024/09/19/dale-yu-review-of-neodreams-essen-spiel-2024/) and I have still enjoyed the game with 3-4 players.  Now that I’m familiar with the flow of the game and what to expect on the cards, the game doesn’t take long at all, and it’s easier to string together chained cards to generate a successful dream engine.  And, for the record, despite what the designer has inscribed in your box, Ben has yet to beat me in the game.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it:  
• I like it:  Ben, Dale
• Neutral:  
• Not for me:  

The questions that have come up in our games are:

Am I limited to ten of each resource (yes, hard limit of ten). 

When do green cards activate? Each time the specific card-condition is met.

In this world where overproduced games with humongous boxes are taking up shelf space, look towards the medium euros, where everyone can have a good experience in a short amount of time. 

-Ben Bruckart

The cat barely fits in the reasonable sized box.