Cerebria: Emotional Turmoil with a Purple Pillar

[Music] welcome my child to the land of cerebri our world of origin place of survey the manual doesn't doesn't really explain cerebra is a big box of warring emotions that plays best with - it's a head-to-head thing or also as a team game of 2v2 there's also a single-player variant and a three player variant but I'm not going to focus on those because life was too short we're just going to go really into the meat and potatoes of this experience in a box because honestly this is already a scenario with far too many potatoes you move characters around this circular map playing cards from your hand into adjacent spaces to trigger effect and change the power balance of frontiers these lines and realms the bits of between the frontiers but rather than placing forts and soldiers or archers or tanks you'll play tranquility or loneliness or a worm named desire [Music] and if you're like I don't want realism I want magic then this is pretty much it right how about there worms how about these covers look at this it's like a summoning circle for a demon made of lavender oh come Lord rid us of these moths and all these abstract little characters fun but these plastic models only come as part of the games big box expansion which means we're going to be using the cardboard cutouts that actually come with the base gangwish literally do make the game less fun and also make the board a lot harder to scan as you play but if it's what's in the box then it's what's in the box as you play you'll upgrade the abilities of your character letting them augment each of the five character actions with bonuses that come with additional costs you can move play emotion cards on the map upgrade those cards to make them more powerful play plastic chunks as fortifications to make realms more yours or diminish the power of the other teams cards or fortifications and although this involves three different currencies and while this muck flurry of oranges and purples looks quite pretty from afar the closer you get to the fine details of things the more it's just slightly unsettling and slightly wrong and unfortunately that's slightly indicative of the overall experience I had with the game yeah fun experience right so let's talk theme positive emotions battling against negative emotions to see who can win it's an interesting idea it's cool but does it work well to understand that we're gonna have to go and do some psychology come with the human psyche is sort of a big bowl full of willpower and when you take willpower out of one of the five spheres of our identity the bowl rotates allowing other emotional spirits access to different spheres and potentially causing identity fragments to be sucked up inside to the core of our psyche in the origin in the event of a revelation at which point both teams score secret objectives I was being facetious it is absolute nonsense look the idea of a personality being formed by the conflict of emotions is a really interesting framework for a game but chief this is not it which I guess shouldn't be a surprise in the game which has anxiety as a playable character and makes them look quite cool rather than predictable and unbelievably boring what this is more accurately is a version of Pixar's inside out a family film about emotions with a clown that made me cry and just like an inside out you've got the central hub that's connected to these whimsical areas that'll represent different aspects of the mind and gosh what a refreshing explosion of color mine's me the time I find an orange with a high-powered catapult into a bathroom for the love of crumpets don't do that it only smells amazing for about 20 minutes anyway on your turn you'll be doing three things you're gonna be moving around between these nodes and take control of the areas by invoking either positive or negative emotions depending on which side you're on and it's basically very much like an area control game you lock down areas and control them but then also interestingly you also try and fight for control of these frontiers putting in cards here that can affect both realms but can also be amplified by putting another card of your type next to it to give both of those a power over here or completely blocked if the other team do that and now this can't affect this room or this room and only affect this frontier not so useful every time anything changes on the tape when you count up the power of the emotions any bonus power they might have four abilities and if there's an identity fragment acting as a fortification then you've add that as well and then use Whittle with all of the tokens around the table that shows you who's currently in control of what but what's the point in controlling rounds Wow first off the parent you get a discount of one willpower when using the realm ability yeah realms have abilities as well you can access them from from anywhere let's let's talk about the abilities obviously you've got your five abilities that you can do for your character but then you've also got five realm abilities and it's quite clear in the manual it says you've got ten possible actions five these five these and then you've got three ambition abilities which you unlock with ambition tokens and then obviously you've got another one absorbed abilities only inaction is one of things so simple it's ten things you know ten and yeah we do need to talk about this manual which is a glossy nightmare I wouldn't really wish on anyone in terms of graphic design it is solid and lovely but the bones of this skeleton are made of squeaky toys using this manual makes it painfully difficult to learn the game for the first time and it's structured in a way that means that this is all that it's good for rules and aspects of the game are often explained twice within the manual but only completely and clearly in one of those places it's like a flow of consciousness has been injected into InDesign and using it it's a bit like chasing a goblin through a Hall of Mirrors I mean even setting up the game you just have to copy this diagram and then obviously still is telling you how to set up the game on page 13 of the manual after it's gone through quite a lot of integral aspects it's just it says a lot when this print out this fridge fan main thing on BoardGameGeek is just a way more effect resource than anything they give you with the game and when something that looks like this is if you've messed up meanwhile on the back of the manual we've got an icon glossary willpower intention points origins fears I'm not gonna mince my biscuits here this game is an unknowable obtuse and frankly unhinged thing and a lot of that is simply because of the theme that they've chosen by making the game all about feelings and emotions they've taken a fairly complicated abstract strategy game and given everything names they're all really really similar I mean even the process when you're setting up the game for the first time I'm just going through all the deck of cards that you can do and finding the list of things that you need for the starter deck feels like an exercise in gaslighting yourself I've already got benevolence haven't I know you've got kindness the problem is it just feels like a game in which the world building was designed by a thesaurus and it makes the game much harder to follow and when you start playing the game it's really fun you think I'm playing embarrassment and the ability that embarrassment has kind of makes sense but as soon as the board fills up it's just so much harder the scan and track what's going on but I've got to say I kind of love how ridiculous is it's the sort of thing you'd expect to see people playing on Star Trek when you're teaching people the game and just explaining all these things you can't help but feel like you're in a fever dream am i real is this real and it's wonderful it's like being assaulted by a rainbow I know look at the names of the locations of these different realms the valley of motives the willow of values they sound like areas you'd be sent for misbehaving a primary school and this is clearly a massive labor of love from the people who created this game but no 6000 people bought it when it was on Kickstarter and it is basically cones of brain Shire having a fun different theme is cool but only if it feels properly embedded in the design of a game in this you could have had Knights and swords and archers and it would have been less interesting but it also would have been far more immediately readable rather than this emotional smush if they made it inverting like if they made it so that anxiety could only be combated with calm or hope would be against despair then that could have been cool but there's nothing like that here it's just points and areas and the thing is we check this game out because we'd heard it was a team game 2v2 and there aren't many team games out there that are interesting so we thought it was worth a look but in reality playing this is a team game it doesn't quite well first up it's a complicated game it's gonna take you a long time to teach people this game then you're gonna have to sit through the basic version of the game just to get you head around it before you can then play the advanced full game so looking at four people three hours per person that's loads of hours secondly it takes away some of the interesting aspects of the area control if you're over there and I'm over here we can kind of just divide and conquer and it takes away a lot of the interesting choices through with movement and deciding where you're gonna try and fight some of these battles but mostly it's just complicated enough that it means that it takes forever for it to be your turn again and so much can change but you can't really plan ahead and yeah it's just sitting isn't my go yet I just feel like an old man filled with regret waiting to die alone oh is it my go sorry I was just thinking about Christopher Nolan's inception but I need to make it crystal clear that there is a really interesting game underneath all of this if you can convince people to put in the frankly quite a lot of time needed to really get to grips with it then you can start building decks out of these frankly quite whopping stacks of cards you I'm not a more complicated version of scoring which doesn't just involve these plastic chunks in the center but also allows you to have points separately on your teams we live in tensions yes sir I'm gonna make it up we light engines I'm just yeah we have attentions honestly like if you can get through these frankly thick layers of emotion one then underneath it you have got an engine that really sure it's a game of long-term strategy of getting yourself into exactly the right position so you can activate exciting combos doing good things will earn you points but if you can plan carefully and chain together multiple of these things in one go then you'll get loads of extra bonus points which means if you're able to fathom what the board will look like in two three four turns time you are able to really stress joins because here's the rub and it's an insane rub it's like tiger balm with crushed up chiles and you rub it all over your body all over your body the rub here is this is a competitive economic euro game and for those not familiar with euro games they're often games where you sit and some stuff happens and then you react to that stuff and do your own little game on your board and at the end of it you count how many karats and caves you've built and then you see who's got the most points finish off your bowl of mushroom soup and happily are in bed by 9:00 p.m. we jest euro games are lovely I personally really love them they're conflict-free yes sometimes it does feel like you're kind of playing on your own but there's a space for that lazy weekends days we were slightly hungover or just days when your mental health is so shredded that you just want to be with nice people but you can't really deal to talk with them much they serve a purpose but the thing is if you have a really good turn in Europe game then you had a really good time well done but if you have a really good turn in this you just made it so the other person is having a bad turn and that is inherently part of this games design and that's this is where right this game I can really recommend to an incredibly neat you Venn diagram of people with people who like really love complex euro games but also really love games that are kind of to the--and mean but also really like games that are kind of pink and purple and month and i mean if that's you then this is this is a thing have you've got three friends like that what one if you have cool if not having the whole spread of public objectives that you're going to be vying for against the other team for the entire of the game blow-by-blow in order present right at the start of the game that combined with the fact that any one round you're going to have a secret objective your team is going towards this isn't a game which rewards fine strategic moves so much as strategic choreography you know you think okay not going to be able to do I'm not gonna be able to do that and then you slowly work towards being able to pirouette and pivot into positions when you know that you think you can get that one then that one then that one then that one at the start of the game you're already thinking an hour and a half ahead and that is frankly for most people too much but for some people oh oh when we reviewed war for the ring we were dazzled by it's ridiculous scope and that's a game which is really not for everyone but it's the sort of thing where if someone said to me hey what for the ring is my favorite game I can be like hell yeah I can understand that cerebra might not be someone's favorite game but I've been kind of see it I can see why people might really love this if you and your friends love euro games and you don't mind biting each other you don't mind that there might be situations where there are no resolutions that please everyone you can't just give everyone a couple of extra cubes and carry on it's not gonna not gonna hold then this could be a real thing so the possibilities for soaring ahead are fiendish as you'd expect but whilst one player will usually head off and become stratospheric when you're normally playing a euro game it doesn't leave other players choking in their smog in fact on all the time you don't know who's won at the end of the game and even when you think you haven't won sometimes you have but here there's a design decision at the very core of this game that is honestly a bit depressing and it's it's right slap-bang in the middle of the table the thing about this is this even the most advanced version of the game this is not all of the score as I said of course you have the wheels of intention but it's enough of a thing in the fact that whilst you're playing you are constantly being reminded of whether or not you are winning or losing by this gigantic obelisk and it's got a horrible and it makes you guys that most of the time when you're playing games where it's like you know person at the end wins with his points maybe there's a good reason why those scores exist around the periphery of what you're focused on rather than at the center because most times I played this we got to a point where it's been maybe an hour left in the game and one person or one team is kind of done and it's because this is just so demoralizing and for this this thing to be the central section these giant plastic things that ship with the game are basically like that the colourful lighthouse that draw you into the game what's this what's this spinning section with this big plastic thing yeah well this is not only an expensive plastic component but it's also something that actively mostly just makes players feel worse plastic shouldn't be toxic arguably unless you're burning it or eating it and so the centerpiece of cerebra is a reminder that sometimes innovation just isn't good and sometimes there's a pretty good reason why everyone tends to do things the same way there's a good reason where scores go around the edge of the board not slap-bang in the middle there's a good reason why you don't have area control games with emotions because they all sound so similar can I recommend cerebrum obviously not to everybody but maybe to some people yes red flag central for game design Oh perfect can tell us something interesting about games like go away all right listen thanks for watching it's an interesting game is it for me No is it for you I don't know you're like you I'm not being you for you it's busy and hard enough being me anyway you can watch some other videos and if you've enjoyed this you can subscribe to the channel write a comment you can do whatever you like it's again it's your life I'm not being you I'm exhausted from me thanks buddy things could be a bit more idiosyncratic and the important thing is to focus on the sorts of people who it's a great opportunity share something with the world just because it's not your cup of tea doesn't mean it's not a cup of tea of somebody else an important thing is that everyone's always very happy about everything and you never have any problems about anything and everything is wonderful look good and that's the most important thing to be happy by

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 141,922

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Matt Lees, Cerebria, Cones of Dunshire, Worm Matt, Heavy games, emotions

Id: DRU9vS-pU_8

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/stetzwebs]

I thoroughly enjoy this game, but he's not wrong about it. I fall into the niche he was talking about. I love setting up moves as a team and then scoring an awesome turn, but almost always in my games those are followed by my opponents scoring a great turn.

I do think he's understating the point potential of the wheel of intentions...I've played where a team with half as many fragments in the center still wins because of the wheel. But in general, it's definitely not a game for everyone, or even everyone into heavy games.

[u/[deleted]]

I knew how this was gonna roll just after seeing the post title, but as usual I got a lot of entertainment out of the delivery. That worm gag still has plenty of life left in it for me :)

[u/thekingofthejungle]

Sometimes I feel like SUSD is sneaking into my place just to look at my collection so they can post yet another video saying they don't like some of my favorite games lol

[u/Kalenedral]

Cerebria: You play as warring factions working to accomplish specific missions / goals in order to gain the most influence. You accomplish this by manipulating the board state utilizing movement and various player powers.

With that said. I love the theme and I DO think it absolutely works. The emotion powers make sense. The movement about the battlefield makes sense. The mission goals make sense. The Identity tower makes sense.

Some things brought up in the review that I do agree with:

1. This game is mean. Really mean. For some, this level of brutality is likely to engender a disconnect with the theme and presentation; quite like Photosynthesis, which is also beautifully presented and equally as cut-throat.
2. The rulebook. Oh my gods! What an utter and complete mess.
3. "It just feels like a game in which the world building was designed by a thesaurus." Agreed. The flowery labels on everything often times un-necessarily complicates things especially (!!!) on the player boards.
4. Turns are long. Yes they are. Keep this game away from your turn uber-optimization analysis paralysis players.

Every game is not for everybody. But this game is definitely for me whereas games like (to compare other popular area control games) Rising Sun and Blood Rage are not.

For anyone interested in the playthrough that helped me understand and grok it all check out Tom Teaches on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xIBFFY5cvs

[u/YrNotYrKhakis]

If you've got a few friends who are heavy board gamers, you can play this no problem. I taught it to new gamers as well, and they enjoyed it.
I recently put up a teaching video for Cerebria on YouTube, since a lot of people seem to have trouble with the rulebook.

[u/[deleted]]

WormMatt is best Matt.

[u/wallysmith127]

Pretty fair review, the best TL:DR takeaway from it was how it will only appeal to a narrow Venn diagram of gamer who is: A) into heavy Euros, B) into toothy, mean interactions and C) into purple and pink and mauve.

However, a couple criticisms...

• Dinging the theme for being pasted on. Granted, the level of foofy language in this is absurd. Learning the terminology is an exercise in frustration in and of itself and is one of the few games where refreshing the rules has defeated me a few times now. That said, it's egregious how Matt completely glosses over the actual ways the theme comes through, in the Spirit abilities and on the cards. Each Spirit has a basic A side that has actions identical to all other spirits then the B side, which has a handful of actions unique to itself. For example, Anxiety is the only spirit that is able to place an Emotion (Bleakness) natively, without using the cards in your hand. And all the card effects in the game convey some sort of connection with its name, like Safety protecting other Emotions or Jealousy providing an upgrade that an opponent already has. Some level of abstraction exists, sure, but since the Spirits and the cards are the meat of the area control, it adds a ton to the aesthetic immersion.

• The tower tracking progress. He harps on how one side can get demoralized when their failure is obvious for all to see but fails to mention how the Team/Common objective system has a number of built in ways to prevent a runaway leader(s). He actually fails to mention the objective (Aspiration) system entirely. Contrast this with SVWAG, who also acknowledges how dense the upfront teach is with the 10+3 different actions you can take but then emphasizes how streamlined your team's actual goals are. This provides a lot of focus to those 10+3 actions because it's not a giant sandbox, you have very obvious short term public and private goals to work towards. This allows for wonderful collaboration with your partner because, yes, while turns are extremely long in this game, you're not just sitting there twiddling your thumbs. The team aspect actually reminds me of Spirit Island, where you can't handle everything but you collaborate with your partner on which areas you can focus on and which ones they can. There's constant reevaluating of the board state on other players' turns and it's an incredibly fun team dynamic that you just don't see in Euro games of this weight.

• The game is mean, yeah. But this is also the company that made Trickerion, which is basically Oneupsmanship: The Game. That level of (sometimes) subtle ways to cut off your opponents at the knees is a feature, not a bug. Mindclash doesn't make games for the faint of heart.

I remember hearing Matt mention playing this for the first time on their podcast and being surprised that they would even play it, considering it's not in their usual wheelhouse (now that Paul's left). The ending assessment doesn't surprise me but I am a bit put off that he ignored some pretty huge dynamics of the game. Even something minor like harping on the standees yet not even acknowledging that the (GORGEOUS) pre-painted minis exist. It feels a bit disingenuous.

That said, his assessment is absolutely correct: it's not a game for everyone and it'll please only a very small niche of gamers (exacerbated because 2v2 is really the ideal player count). But if you fit into that mold? It's an amazingly unique design. Area control without combat, heavy asymmetry, highly combo-focused gameplay, team-based heavy Euro. If your group is the type to dive multiple times into something deep and meaty and craves something different from the norm, Cerebria is a bonafide winner.

[u/hendecatope]

I really tried to like Cerebria, but felt the rules got in the way of the game play and eventually sold my copy. The game looks great on the table and I love the theme and did not mind the disconnect between mechanics/theme.

[u/zamoose]

"EmotionWang" made me bark-laugh.

EDIT: I guess folks aren't familiar with NumberWang?