“Nightmare. That’s fine – I have a key.”
“Sure, we won’t need that.”
“Nightmare again. Well, I have to discard my hand I guess. At least I don’t have a key now.”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
“Aaaand nightmare. Did you shuffle these cards?”
“There’s a perfectly valid mathematical explanation of what is happening right now.”
Onirim is a simple card game you can either play solo or as a two-player game. Needless to say, it is the two-player aspect that I am reviewing here. According to the story, you find yourself in dreamland, presumably dreaming together with your partner, which is bad for some reason, and now you must find the way out through a colorful labyrinth by unlocking all the dream doors.
In the game, you both have a hand of cards, and you take turns doing something with your existing cards and then drawing from the deck. You both need to find one red, one tan, one green, and one blue door before the deck runs out. Most of the cards in the deck are… well I’m struggling to find the right word here. They are foot soldier cards. Fillers. They basically have a colour and a day / night symbol. I had to check the rulebook here, these are called location cards. You can find doors by either
- playing three consecutive location cards that have the same colour with alternating day / night symbol in your play area (so for example, red day, then red night, and then red day again);
- having a key of the corresponding colour in your hand when you happen to draw that specific door – which, needless to say, is very hard to plan with.
There is a shared portion of your hand of cards you can both use, and you can exchange one of your privately owned cards with one from the pool, thus exchanging cards with each other in a very ineffective manner.
But oh no, there are also evil dream cards called nightmares. If you draw them, you can decide your fitting punishment, discard a key card, discard your hand, discard the top 5 cards from the deck, or lose an already opened door.
If both of you find your set of doors, you win the game. If you run out of cards before you can do that, you lose.
Disclaimer: The game also comes with a dizzying amount of possible mods you can add to your gameplay. However, I have a rule not to pursue potential excitement in expansions whenever the base game was lacking. And spoiler alert, it was. So this is purely the base game’s summary, with no additional content.
The Good
Onirim is a very clean, simple, well-structured game. It is easy to learn, teach, understand. It does not take on much, but what little it does, the game actually delivers on. Like Solitaire.
The Bad
It’s a bit hard for me to list the bad things about this game. It mostly stems from a fact that it’s very simple and there’s not much depth, which the creators were probably aware of. But here we go.
The artwork looks OK at first glance, but rather boring at second. I guess the artist had quite a difficult job at hand. For the location cards, the color is linked to a specific element, so blue is water for example. So the blue location cards are like kindergarten drawings of fishy and watery things. The day and night card is slightly different, but nothing really indicates the time in the day, it’s not like the fish are sleeping or anything. The longer you look, the weirder it gets, actually. Maybe this would be a plus. Nah, I’m keeping the artwork in the bad category for making me feel weird.
The game is obviously incredibly abstract. But it’s only an abstract game if you make it to be. There could be a theme here, just not this one, because there is no connection whatsoever between gameplay and story. You are simply collecting sets, and this whole dream labyrinth aspect feels arbitrary with the mundane engine.
So far, we were merely warming up for the badness. I think the biggest issue of the game is that once you get the rules, the largest portion from the game is merely going through the motions. Most of the time, there is one clear best strategy to use. For example, if you start a color, unless you get the corresponding door from another source, you won’t start another color one until you get the current one you are working on, because it’s simply not worth it. Or take the nightmare cards, the rulebook even lists the possible punishments in the order you should pick them. So you get a nightmare, check if you have a key, discard it if you have it, and if not, discard your hand. You don’t even have to consider the rest of the options.
I also found the game to be too easy with two players, because you can really effectively help each other, especially once one of you have all the doors.
The worst aspect of the game is the Solitaire connection. It does feel like playing Solitaire, you draw a card, and you do something that is very obviously the best choice, and it honestly just felt like a waste of time.
The Co-Op
There is some co-op there, you can exchange cards after all, and you have to look out for what your partner is collecting. Ultimately though it is very light, and this mode was obviously an afterthought for a solo game.
The Recommendation
Well, I will never play this game again with two players, unless I’m being forced to. However, I also have a difficulty recommending something similar but better instead. Onirim is an extremely simple card game, and it turns out maybe I just don’t like extremely simple card games. If that’s what you are after though, go ahead, have fun, worst-case scenario, you wasted 15 minutes.
Info
| Release Year | 2010 |
| Genre | Luck |
| Difficulty | Very Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 2 |
| Length | 10 minutes |
Rating
| Overall | Bad |
| Story | Terrible |
| Co-Operation | Bad |