Onirim deals a little dream and still has seven more to show you

I think sometimes it is advantageous to start a set with 2 cards. After all, you might easily draw the other card you need in the process. If you have a key in hand, one thing that I’ve done is to play the first two, and if I don’t have the third yet, burn the key to peek at the deck. There’s a pretty good chance you will get what you need within 7 cards. It is a gamble, and sometimes you have to abandon a color, but you might give it a try.

If I have a key that will finish a set, I use it, no questions asked. I don’t feel like doing so ever cost me a game. I guess this depends on what point in the game you are whether it seems attractive.

I tried this early on without much success. I don’t think starting a set without near certainty you’ll get the third is viable. But then again, my win rate is so low, I need to rethink things.

You use it to finish the set or use it to peek at the deck?

To finish a set all the time. To look at the deck occasionally.

OK, thanks. I will try that approach and see if I can get to 25% win rate.

One thing that is really important in my opinion is assessing when to discard your hand to a nightmare (in the better case scenario, it might even help you out), and when to discard the 5 top cards. The important thing about discarding the 5 top cards is you draw 5 cards, but actually only discard the playable cards: the more doors and nightmares in your game, the more powerful this option actually get. When you have a horrible game going, with half the deck gone, not many doors opened and still a lot of nightmares in the deck, it become so strong it sometimes allows me to win what looked like a doomed game.

I understand how this 5x option works, but I don’t understand how it can become a good option. From my view, it is the worst option: it weeds out usable cards, and it depletes the total number of cards in the deck, hastening the game’s end. I’m not getting how this can turn into a powerful strategy.

I generally discard 5 as a last resort, meaning I’ve got no keys and I have something in my hand that completes a set.

Yup, that’s my view. Dying to know how it can become a strong option.

Well it’s a pretty simple gamble: if you got 20 cards in your deck, amongst which there are 7 nightmares and let’s say 4 doors, odds are high you will discard less than 3 cards or even none if lucky. it let’s you cycle a nightmare filled deck while preserving your held cards, and building it up, tentatively. of course, if you discard your held cards repeatedly, this doesn’t serve any purpose.

I don’t go over in-depth statistics, but this is a pretty simple concept to me, and one that has let me come back with a victory in a lot of seemingly lost games. I only have 65% of wins though.

Edit: I also sometimes use it as a gamble early in the game, although that’s not the smartest thing. But some hands can’t be discarded.
To me, discarding your hand is not even a last resort: I only do it when it serves me because that hand is flooded with useless cards (sun cards of colors I only completed, for instance). I tend to hang on to keys.

OK, thanks. I will keep that in mind. I tend to think that if I get down to fewer than 30 cards left in the deck, and more than 5 nightmares left, the game is lost. So I will try shifting to your use of Discard 5 as the first option at that point. It makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been playing this a lot, and hovering around 46% win ratio. Working very hard to get that back up above 50%. I’ve never played the tabletop version, so this is my first experience with the game. It’s become my new timewaster.

What are some of the expansions in the tabletop version? I assume these will be released as $1 DLC over time for the mobile version.

Does everyone play with all the expansions?

Sadly we can’t: the digital version is just barebone right now. This being Asmodee, we have a slight chance of getting the expansions (I think they released some recently for Mysterium, but that was, if I am not mistaken, a first on their part), but I bet it depends on the success of the base game… which is ironic, since my understanding is that the physical version is bundled with them now, and from Tom’s article, the game is meant to be played with them.

I believe they were always part of the physical game, which is why I don’t like calling them expansions. They’re more like the full game, with what we get in the digital version being more like a tutorial.

Nah, first edition only came with Book of Steps Lost and Found, Towers and Dark Premonition and Happy Dreams.

Ah, gotcha.

So what do the expansions add?

I can see that the base game is pretty simple, but no less so than something like Lost Cities, so I think it’s a little patronizing of people to say that those of us playing the current digital game are just playing a tutorial.

the base game gets a bit repetitive and the expansions mix up things by adding risk/reward elements. You get the Happy Dreams cards, but they go with the Premonitions. It plays out different every time… I had a tough game yesterday, where one Premoniton was that if you complete 4 different doors you need to discard all Happy Dreams from the deck… I had to play around it until I got my 1st Happy Dream to get rid of the Deadly Premonition… Quite a challenge, I lost at the end but it was a tense ride.

I own the physical version and I liked the game, but was a little put off by all the shuffling. I only ever played it enough to really grok the base game.

Now that I’ve got the base game on my phone, I can’t get enough of it and I’d love to try out the expansions again. Except the idea of shuffling so much seems even less appealing now that the iOS game has me spoiled.

I suppose there are worse problems to have.

That’s crazy talk to me. I can’t get my hands on a deck of cards without wanting to shuffle them. It’s almost a Pavlovian thing. My fingers start going into shuffle muscle memory!

-Tom