[PREVIEW] Dreamcards – Strategic Exploration of Consciousness

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Personally, I’ve come across at least three different card games centered around the theme of dreams and nightmares. In these cases, however, luck and the decisions made by the other participants played a major role in determining the winner. Dreamcards, on the other hand, is a video game that, as the name suggests, is also based on the fairly common concept of combining dreams with a deck of cards, but this time everything depends on the strategy you adopt when selecting cards to play, building your deck, and reacting to events as they unfold. 

An esoteric battle against darkness

Dreamcards is a roguelike deckbuilder in which we battle nightmarish monsters using cards to get closer to uncovering a great mystery. The gameplay consists of two parts: the day, during which we select and combine strategies in the form of cards, which we will then use during the night match. The card battle against the monster itself also has its own segments, including an action phase where you play cards and accumulate imagination points, which can be exchanged for new cards during the buy phase.

As you can see from this brief summary, there’s a lot of information to take in right from the start, which might cause a bit of confusion. The tutorial explains the most important elements in a fairly clear and simple way, and tips on card effects, how to play them, and the meaning of the various imagination points are available to the player throughout the game, which helps you get into the rhythm and figure things out fairly quickly. 

My only reservation about the introductory instructions was that they focus almost exclusively on nighttime gameplay, whereas we make key decisions as early as the daytime deck-building phase – something we don’t really have a chance to know at first, and it would be worth mentioning at least briefly. 

Once we get into the right flow, the possibilities for tactics and forward planning are truly vast: there are character cards, archetypes, strategies, and points that we can mix and match however we want. There are just as many things to keep in mind, since some cards have effects that last for a limited number of turns, actions that modify one type of point can affect others, and even the act of buying cards must be carefully considered so as not to clog up your deck. 

So what matters isn’t just combining beneficial effects in the here and now, but also keeping track of turns (both your own and the monster’s, which grows stronger over time and may even add its own cards to yours), managing your deck, and taking risks by trying out new cards. 

Our goal every night is to earn 10 sun points to achieve a lucid dream and win, while the monster adds points that counterbalance ours and bring us closer to a nightmare. This is also where the game’s roguelike nature comes into play, because to defeat the monster, we must beat it over seven consecutive nights, each one more difficult than the last.

However, if we fail even once, we have to start all over again. Each time, however, something new awaits us: whether it’s the chance to choose a card we haven’t played before, receive stickers that boost card effects, or get a piggy bank that comes in handy in a pinch. 

Psychological story in a half-awake state

In Dreamcards, every decision matters – and that goes for our actions outside of match as well. As mentioned earlier, during the day we select cards that represent actions and characters from our everyday lives, which we then use during the night to create our unique narrative. 

The game further emphasizes these experiences through visuals and sound: during the day, each card is associated with a dark memory depicted as black-and-white hand-drawn illustrations, while at night, placing any of the archetype cards in place of the original one, The Self, changes the music to an arrangement associated with the character depicted on that card. 

This allows us to piece together our character’s backstory and fits nicely into the game’s overall atmosphere, which includes references to psychological concepts such as the id, the ego, and daydreaming. 

Given its wide range of tactical possibilities – and, consequently, its high replay value – Dreamcards stands out as an interesting choice for fans of card games and turn-based strategy games. 

While it requires a thorough understanding of how the gameplay works and the significance of its various elements, mastering it provides immense satisfaction and allows you to immerse yourself in the game for hours on end. 

Since the full version will be released on August 19, we’ll then have the opportunity to explore the full range of possibilities in the world of dreams and discover what else the human subconscious has in store.