Dreamy

There will always be new "clue giving" games to try. One that my group recently discovered is When I Dream, which adds the twist that sometimes, you don't want to be giving good clues.

Players takes turns being the Dreamer, either covering their eyes or wearing a quirky little sleep mask that comes with the game. You have 2 minutes as players work through a stack of cards, giving the Dreamer single word clues about things they have to guess. The Dreamer can let the group circle around as much as they want, but they get only one guess -- that guess is either right or wrong (and you don't find out right away which), and then it's on to the next card.

Before each round begins, all the players are given a secret role to card to play during the round. Fairy players are meant to give the Dreamer "good dreams," giving the best clues they can and scoring points for every correct guess. Boogeymen players work against the group; they score a point for every incorrect guess by the Dreamer. A rare but special role card, the Sandman, tasks a player with maintaining balance; they score best if right and wrong guesses are equal, and score nothing at all if they're too unequal.

The mix of roles is a bit different depending on the number of players, but the game can take as many as 10 people, and having those different goals each round really makes the game. There's a surprising amount of strategy in giving bad clues. You don't want your clue to be so bad that it's obviously wrong, because if the Dreamer pegs you as trying to sabotage them, they'll just stop listening to the clues you give. You can sometimes get help in your sabotage from other Boogeymen, but if you've figured out who they are, there's a risk the Dreamer has too.

Scoring for the Dreamer offers a bonus. They score for the number of correct guesses, but they also can pick up a 2 point bonus if (before removing the blindfold) they can recall every guess they made (correct or incorrect) during the round. Basically: can you remember your dream? It's a neat idea, but the scale of the points felt off to my group. You can easily pile up 6 or 7 guesses in a 2-minute round, and it's simply not worth the effort (or time bogging down the game) to try to remember them all.

Everybody gets one chance at being the Dreamer, so the game plays in just 2 minutes per player. It's a fast filler to slip in on a crowded game night. The designery may not have packed the game with enough clues to give it staying power, though. For the sake of flavor, the game comes with an elaborate plastic "four-post bed" that holds the clue cards, and those cards are lavishly illustrated. There's a clue on each end, with the illustration being a quirky, "non-sensical as dreams are" way of combining the two into one picture. They look fantastic, but you get a small stack of them compared to, say, the huge pile of tiny cards you get in Codenames. Basically, if you play When I Dream too much, too frequently, you'll probably remember some of the weirder words in the mix, which I would expect to have an impact on the gameplay.

Still, it's a clever twist in the genre overall, and a good large group game to have on hand. I give When I Dream a B+.