Review of Cerebria: The Inside World

Blurb from the publisher: 'Submerge into your Inside World and shape the future of Cerebria in this objective-driven, area control team game. Play as one of the eight different spirits, with their specific powers and Emotion decks. Explore 64 different Emotion Creatures, and customize your deck from 200 cards. Discover Cerebria's huge main board, and build the identity on its rotating centerpiece.

- Solo / Co-op variant with variable difficulty level.'

What you get: Your EUR 69 or equivalent will buy you Cerebria: The Inside World, the objective-driven, area-control game that started the Cerebria game line. The game can accommodate from one to four players in over two hours.

In addition to the 36-page game's rulebook and the 12-page Solo or Co-op Game Mode Rulebook which can be found on the publisher's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: one Main board, 4 double-sided Bliss Spirit boards, 4 double-sided Gloom spirit board, one Bliss double-sided Team board, one Gloom double-sided Team board, 64 Bliss and 64 Gloom Mild Emotion cards, 32 Bliss and 32 Gloom Strong Emotion cards, 2 Brightness Emotion cards, 6 Bleakness Emotion cards, 9 Gloom 9 Common and 9 Bliss Aspiration cards, one Origin board, one base piece, 20 Gloom and 20 Bliss Essence counters, 60 Willpower counters, 32 Bliss and 32 Gloom Vibe tokens, 8 Wild Bliss and 8 Wild Gloom vibe tokens, 5 Bliss and 5 Gloom Minor Identity Fragments, 3 Bliss and 3 Gloom Major Identity fragments, one Bliss and one Gloom Capping Identity fragment, 2 Bliss and 2 Gloom Action Tracker tokens, 4 Bliss and 4 Gloom Player Order tokens, 6 Ambition tokens, 4 Point counters, 5 double-sided Frontier Control markers, 5 double-sided Realm Control markers, 4 Bliss and 4 Gloom figures with plastic stands, 6 Insecurity tokens, and 12 Bliss and 18 Gloom double-sided intensity tokens.

Gameplay: In one of the most surrealistic themes ever devised, Cerebria sees Bliss and Gloom fighting against one another (either as a two-player or as a team experience) in order to shape the world. Players try to complete minor objectives called Intentions, as well as major objectives called Aspirations. The latter change dynamically during the game. There is also a Common aspiration that the teams try to complete, as well as a Hidden Aspiration per team. Revelations are scoring events which reveal and evaluate Aspirations. The more Aspirations one resolves, the more Cerebria's identity is created through the use of Fragments. The game ends when the last Common Aspiration card is scored, when a team acquires 20 or more points on their Wheel of Intentions, or when a team scores a Minor or Major Fragment but has none remaining of that type. The winner is the team with the most points on their Wheels of Intentions, also adding 3, 5, and 4 points respectively for each Minor, Major, and the capping Fragment.

Players in the same team have different Intentions to score, and will play different spirits. Each spirit has a thematically appropriate special power in addition to its standard actions. Players do not play in a fixed order, while Bliss and Gloom players play interchangeably. A player may play his spirit on an empty space on one of the five frontiers, an Emotion on a slot adjacent to the Frontier's Emotion slot, and place one Essence on the first shaded Essence space of the Emotion card. Frontier control is determined by three Emotion slots (that of the Frontier itself and the two adjacent slots inside the Realms), while Realm control is influenced by the two slots firmly in the Realm, its two Frontier slots, as well as the Fortress space. To control either a Frontier or a Realm a team needs to score the most Intensity in its Emotions (in other words use its Essence the most effectively). Controlling either a Realm or a Frontier may be a condition for an Aspiration, while each provides also an additional benefit.

In a given turn a player may take three actions out of the 10 available. Five are Spirit actions while another five are Realm actions. Additionally a player may take Ambition abilities, even though only one can be taken per turn. As is expected in such a kind of game, actions relate to placing something, moving something, substituting something, turning something into something else and so on and so forth. Some actions require fuel while others don't.

Solo rules introduce Ego, an artificial opponent playing with two Spirits. There are changes in the ruleset as expected while Ego's turn is scripted on a particular algorithm. The solo game's difficulty can be either increased or reduced.

The strong points: Do you like area control games with a milliard choices, different paths towards achieving things, and continuously altering variables? If yes, Cerebria: The Inside World might be just the game for you. Its different layers of area control with the distinction between Realms and Frontiers are clever, to say the least, while the results they produce are also very solid. A player will have myriad options and paths to choose from in order to achieve his goals. The game thrives on efficiency, on combos, on seeing your three actions produce the most value possible before your opponent can thwart your play. Progress is not slow; each move alters the board substantially. Your actions can be both directly and indirectly aggressive, either because you alter the positioning of opposing cards, or because you slowly claim your place on the board at the expense of what your opponent can do. The game has luck elements, luck alone however will never grant you victory. Choices are meaningful, even though at times they appear overwhelming. In two player games, you will have the chance of strategizing and creating combos that may potentially spill over into you future moves.

There are many memorable elements about the game. The area control is the obvious one, the combos however are something else. This isn't the entrenched sort of area control that other games might promote. This is about controlling the right thing at the right time, so that you can force its scoring. I also particularly enjoyed the uniqueness of the Emotions; they add a lot towards the enjoyment of the game. The discounts on Realm actions provided by the Realm itself increases the amount of options you have in your hands... provided you control that Realm. Combo and efficiency games usually suffer from the rich getting richer syndrome, Cerebria however tackles this through a clever catch up mechanism where each Major Fragment a team scores provides the chance to the opposing team to later the Common and their Hidden Aspiration. All this might sound like too much, yet the interlocking mechanisms are really polished and it shows. The feeling Cerebria gives me is that of a game that can only be played by involved, hardcore gamers. The more one invests in it, the more he can enjoy it.

The solo game is very strong. The AI rules are very clear and the experience can be revealing, especially when one is still learning the game. I definitely recommend it, even though it might not become my all-time-favourite solo due to its theme.

All the aforementioned make Cerebria: The Inside World an extremely replayable game. It can keep you occupied for hundreds of plays seeing how each game will bring up different emotion cards, each side has different routes to victory, each Spirit plays differently etc.

Just like every title published by Mindclash Games up to now, Cerebria's production values are sky-high. No other game in the market has either art or aesthetics resembling anything like this. It will not be everybody's cup of tea, it is however masterfully made and is bound to attract attention. The pastel colour palette is very original for a game with such an involved gameplay. The box is very sturdy, without any meaningless tray. This is very good news for those who would enjoy inserting the contents of the expansion in it. The Emotion cards are purposefully big (70 x 120 cm big to be precise) in order to accommodate the Essence tokens on them while showing the pictographs at a big enough size. That requires some quirky sleeve hunting, but I cannot blame the publisher for the choice of size; the game needed big cards.

Forces of Balance, the game's expansion, is out already. We will examine it shortly, just like we examined Cerebria: The Card Game, an independent card game with the same theme. If anything, the line is well-supported.

The weak points: The theme is not for everybody, and I include myself in this. There is some semblance of an effort when it comes to Emotion cards actually having something to do with the results that their actions produce, beyond that however it is all a haze. I didn't care at all about Bliss and Gloom fighting out, the Fragments (which however look imposing on the table) or the otherwise original yet game-wise pointless names of the cards, something that limited my thematic submersion.

Cerebria can be played strategically solo or with two players, it will be impossible however to achieve that with four. In such a setup it is an exclusively tactical experience. You will try to optimize your turn and that will be it, hoping that your co-player can pick things up where you left them. This is not a bad thing in itself, it shows however that different players mean a different type of experience. Some might enjoy the former, some the latter, and even more so because a full table translates into only a very limited amount of turns of play per player. This, combined with the unavoidable downtime and the AP issues that the game faces, might put some people off.

Even though I did not find the game hard to learn or teach, this is by no means a fast-track exercise. My first contact with the game in Essen Spiel 2018 was nothing short of a failure to understand even basic concepts. It will take a knowledgeable player around 45 minutes in order to thoroughly explain all of the game's concepts and mechanisms. The very busy board, the numerous and complex-looking pictographs (which should have been even bigger), the fiddly movable parts and the trippy names on the cards do not help newer players. A new player has zero chances of defeating an experienced one. Expect the learning curve to last for some 3-4 committed games before you start reducing playing time while forming rudimentary strategies instead of still wondering what you can do. This is definitely going to hurt the pool of potentially interested players, and even more so because balance between effort put and entertainment gained is not as effective as I would have liked it to.

Conclusion: Cerebria: The Inside World is a game that will create an impression, no matter what that is. With gorgeous art which however is not easy to digest, an innovative theme that might feel soulless due to the lack of a tangible anchor, and thoroughly polished and interesting mechanics which however can be really hard to get into, it can rate anything from 3/3 to 5/5. For me personally 3/4 is just about right.

To find out more about Cerebria: The Inside World and Mindclash Games, take a look at http://mindclashgames.com.

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