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.
“Daddy, I’ll be honest…this one is a negative 0.5 for me.”
My nine-year-old son, a boy who enjoys judging games almost as much as he enjoys judging every single restaurant in sight, had just wrapped up our first play of the new small-box release from Devir, Deep Dreams. According to the manual, “little Bruno has gone to bed, and now he travels through the land of dreams.” In the game, players manage a hand of cards that illustrate the path Bruno is taking on his dream journey. The cards are illustrated with pictures of Bruno in bed and a variety of arrows that must be aligned to build paths for Bruno’s sleep cycle.
It’s an interesting idea, or at least it felt like it to me on paper. And when I taught the game to the boy, he leaned in. The box has a cute picture of Bruno’s hand, grasping a bunny rabbit fluffy partially exposed by Bruno’s bedsheets. Of course, things changed quickly the first time the game allowed me to steal one of my son’s cards, then again later when I was granted my first chance to take cards away from his tableau.
“Oh…it’s THAT kind of game,” you might be uttering.
And yes, Deep Dreams is that kind of game: a somewhat stabby race to score the most points by simply playing cards to the table. In most cases (tied to player count), when someone has played 10 cards to the table, the game ends after everyone has had the same number of turns. Points are scored by building “Dream Groups”—the game’s term for placing cards that line up with the same color scheme—as each card lays out colors in different zones in a different order. It’s also important to line up each card so that the arrows running along the middle keep Bruno on the same “Sleep Path.”
This all makes Deep Dreams easy to teach, and easy to score…but the game’s short 10-to-15-minute runtime never got players excited. Sometimes, turns end with a player not playing a card at all, and because there’s no hand limit, I found my son in an interesting situation during that initial play: he was trying to build off of his starting card, then could not find cards that lined up the right colors when he continued to draw a larger and larger hand.
“Hey buddy,” I started. “Just a reminder that the game is going to end after one of us plays 10 cards…and I already have seven cards on the table!”
“I know, I know, but I want to play the right card,” he said. “The arrows will line up, but I won’t score enough points with the colors.”
I liked the card play in Deep Dreams tied to the icon effects that shook up play, even if my son did not. You can really mess with other players in this game, fine in a title that plays so quickly (and assuming you are cool with your dreams being dashed when people like me steal your possessions!).
Or maybe I liked Deep Dreams more when I was the one stealing cards from opponents or wrecking their tableaus. In fact, the seven icon effects let players break some rules, cover previously played cards, scope the top three cards of the draw deck, or double a card’s represented value in a Dream Group during final scoring.
Either way, Deep Dreams isn’t terribly, well, deep. As a family-weight game that plays fast, Deep Dreams was OK. The strength of Devir’s extensive catalog lies elsewhere.
