Think you'll have fun playing this game? Dream on!

Well, that's half an hour of our lives we won't get back. Last night me and the mister had a bout of ennui, and decided to play this -

We'd bought it from a charity shop in Wales a couple of months ago, but stuff kept getting in the way and we never got round to playing it. Eventually, after putting everything we own into alphabetical order, watching every episode of The Foster And Allen Show ever made, and sterilising all our cutlery, we had to face the sad truth – there was nothing else to do but play this game.

We settled down with the various bits and pieces, safe in the smug knowledge that at least we weren't out vandalizing bus stops. We clung to that thought as the game went on, because we needed to feel something good about playing this game.

According to Board Game Geek, “Dream On is an exciting new board game that answers the age old question 'What do my dreams really mean?' The game provides over 1000 dream interpretations derived from the works of the world's most prominent dream analysts."

Here is the bored, I mean the board -

Even the board looks like it's going to sleep.

Also included are a load of interpretation cards, which we'll get to in a minute. Note that someone enjoyed playing this game so much that they went to the trouble of going out and photocopying a few million of these cards. This was presumably around the time of the game's launch in 1992, so the chances of them having a photocopier at home would have been slim. That means they would have had to go out, find a shop with a photocopier, and pay 10p a copy. This game does not deserve that.

Now then – the rules!

I think the general aim of the game is to be able to read people's minds. Let's see -

First – all the players select a piece and place it on the START square. We're all over this shit so far.

Now then. The person selected to be the 'dreamer' (in this case, the mister) selects a card and reads one dream aloud from the card.

This is the card he picked -

The dreamer reads the dream out, and the other players have to write what they think is a convincing interpretation of it.

This is what I wrote -

Then all the players apart from the dreamer vote on which they think is the correct/most likely interpretation.

Hang on, wait, what? How are we supposed to do that with only two players?

Then we spotted this -

Fuck. A whole four minutes wasted. Also, the adults thing is questionable. Never mind, we are nothing if not belligerent. So we decided to continue playing, albeit with slightly tweaked rules.

Are you asleep yet? If not, well done. I am.

Then the mister hit on a bright idea. The dreamer reads a dream out, then we both write down an interpretation of it, so together with the interpretation on the card there are three different interpretations. Then the dreamer reads out all three, and the other player has to choose the correct one.

Spot the flaw in that plan.

What is the point of me writing anything down on my card? I'm going to know that's not the correct answer. Nevertheless, we played with these rules for a while, and I kept choosing my own interpretation just to piss the mister off.

After roughly half an hour, here's where we were on the board -

By now we were so bored we were actively trying to lose, just so the game would stop.

After a while we even gave up on that and just started writing down dreams we'd had (real and imagined) and what we thought they might mean. Here are some of them -

Then we had to decide whether to carry on playing or to hit ourselves over the head with a sack of bricks. Luckily, it was time to go to bed before we could decide.

The end.

Like this post? Try these -

We play the Just Seventeen Kiss Chase board game!

Playing board games as an adult