Cerebria: The Inside World Review

Simply wow! Cerebria: The Inside World by Mindclash Games is serious eye candy. This is one of the most visually stunning games I have ever played. The artwork is unbelievably good and captures the inner workings of a mindscape which forms the battleground between the forces of bliss and gloom seeking to take control of the origin at the centre.

Despite the head turning table presence of the sizeable main board and player boards, underneath the beautiful aesthetic is a complex, area control game that requires a number of plays to develop a full understanding of the rules.

Cerebria - The Game

Cerebria is a 1-4 player game, although it is best set-up as a two on two co-operative competitive game. The rules explain the different game options depending on player count and include a solo and a two-player game.

Player choose a spirit emotion, including love, harmony, misery and anxiety, and place the corresponding standee on one of the 10 available spaces on the board. Players each select the four actions available at the start of the game by placing tokens on their player boards. Emotion cards are placed onto the board, cards are shuffled, objectives checked, hand of two cards are dealt out and token are sorted - the game is ready to go.

Players can take three actions per turn and this is where the complexity really starts. Player boards provide 4-5 spirit actions and can be upgraded by discarding an emotion card from your hand. There are four groups of emotions and each additional upgrade must be from a different emotion group. Alongside your own spirit actions, the board offers an additional five actions that can be used during your turn.

The game requires emotion cards to be placed on key area of the board and depending on the essence (power) added to the cards, the different teams can gain control of two area types on the board: frontiers and realms. Controlling these provides reduction in cost for actions and allows players to gain more of the game currency (will power) and potentially supports a team's objective.

Players work together towards completing a shared objective and each team has an additional individual hidden objective to complete. These are checked at the end of each round and depending on the results, team fragments are placed in the rotating centre of the board (the origin). These will contribute to scoring at the end of the game.

Once each turn, players can draw willpower from one of the five spaces of the origin and potentially collect additional bonuses. Once one of these spaces has been emptied of willpower, the round ends (a revelation) objectives are checked and fragments are added. If players have used an action to fortify a realm they control, and the fragment played is adjacent to the emptied origin, it is also added to the growing column in the origin, scoring additional points at the end of the game.

Points are picked up throughout the game by completing specific intentions outlined on your team board, these are tracked on the team score tracker. At set points on the tracker players receive bonuses.

A game of Cerebria ends following the last revelation, when all objectives have been completed or when a team cannot place a fragment so have to place their top piece on the origin. Points are totalled up and the highest score wins.

Once this level of the game is mastered there are additional rules: players have specific powers, as do the cards that are played, there are a number of options in terms of your starting deck of emotion cards and you can also upgrade your emotion cards to more powerful emotions, during your turn. The player boards are double-sided, allowing player actions to become more asymmetric.