Onirim – Lost in the Labyrinth of Dreams

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone!

Today I’m taking you on a journey through the world of dreams. Will you find all the doors and escape the labyrinth before the nightmares consume you? Let me show you how it works.

Table of Contents

Game Overview

Onirim is a 2014 release for 1–2 players, ages 10+, with a playtime of 15 minutes. It was designed by Shadi Torbey and illustrated by Élise Plessis. Onirim was originally published by Z-Man Games. The English edition is now published directly by inPatience.

The second edition includes the base game plus all seven expansions in one box. It was also nominated for the 2014 Golden Geek Best Solo Board Game award.

Onirim (Second Edition) box

Theme

You are a Dreamwalker, lost in the labyrinth of dreams. To find your way out, you must discover the eight Onirim doors hidden somewhere in the deck. But your path is not clear: nightmares lurk among the cards, ready to disrupt your plans and make your escape all the harder.

The entire game is played with a single deck of cards, made up of location cards, door cards, and nightmare cards. Simple, elegant, and surprisingly tense.

How to Win

You win by finding and unlocking all eight doors before the deck runs out. Doors can be claimed in two ways: by playing a sequence of three cards of the same colour with no repeated symbols in your labyrinth row, or by discarding a key card from your hand when a door is drawn. Run out of cards before you find them all, and you lose.

Key Concepts

A few terms come up throughout the game and are worth knowing before diving into gameplay:

Limbo is a temporary holding area. Nightmare and door cards that cannot be immediately resolved go here, and are shuffled back into the deck at specific moments during the game.

Card types in the deck are:

Sun and moon cards: standard location cards with no special effects, used to build your labyrinth row.
Key cards: can be played like sun or moon cards, but also have a special power. Discarding a key triggers a prophecy: look at the top five cards of the deck, discard one, then arrange the remaining four in any order and return them to the top.

Gameplay

I will describe the solo rules, as that is the only way I have played.

On each turn you play or discard a card from your hand, then draw back up to five cards. Cards are played into your labyrinth row, and the rule is simple but strict: you cannot repeat a symbol consecutively. So if your last card was a sun, the next one must be a moon or a key.

Each time you draw, there is a chance the new card is a nightmare. When that happens, you must resolve it immediately using one of four options:

Discard a key card from your hand
Send one of your already-claimed door cards back to limbo
Reveal and discard the top five cards of the deck (doors and nightmares among them go to limbo instead)
Discard your entire hand, then redraw as at setup (any doors or nightmares in the new draw go to limbo)

The tension of these decisions is where most of the game lives.

The different type of cards. From left to right: sun, moon, key, door and nightmare

Setup & Components

Inside the box you will find a fold-out insert that holds all the cards perfectly. The little Incubus token sits in there too, a small but beautifully crafted pawn. The card illustrations are immersive and atmospheric, and the overall material quality is excellent.

Setup is refreshingly quick. Shuffle the full deck (base game only to start), draw five cards as your opening hand. Any doors or nightmares in that initial hand go to limbo, and you keep drawing until you have five valid cards. Shuffle limbo back into the deck and you are ready to go. Even when adding expansions, setup rarely takes more than a couple of extra minutes.

The rulebook is short and well-written, with clear illustrations that make the rules easy to grasp even for first-time players.

Onirim - inside of the box

Content and insert

The Little Incubus

The Little Incubus is a token included in the base game that offers three difficulty levels.

Easy mode: Once per game, you can cancel the effect of a nightmare card by discarding the Incubus token.

Normal mode: The Incubus lets you anticipate a nightmare. At any point, you can place the Incubus on the next card you will draw. If that card is a location or door card, tuck it under the Incubus. Later, when you actually draw a nightmare, you can discard that tucked card instead, treating it as if you had already resolved the nightmare earlier. Once used, the Incubus is available again.

Hard mode: Works the same as normal mode, but you must tuck two cards under the Incubus instead of one, raising the cost of the protection.

The little incunbus pawn

The Expansions

The second edition comes with seven expansions, each designed to be played individually or combined. I have played each one separately but have not yet mixed them. Below is a section for each one, followed by my overall thoughts. One thing worth mentioning: each expansion includes the necessary material to be combined with the others, and some even have specific integration rules. For example, the four extra door cards from The Glyphs are designed to be incorporated into The Book of Steps Lost and Found when playing both together. Each expansion is also easily identifiable by a unique symbol printed on the lower right corner of its cards, which makes sorting and setting up any combination quick and painless.

Expansion Components

The Book of Steps Lost and Found

This expansion adds a new victory condition on top of finding the doors: you must unlock them in a specific order. At the start of the game, shuffle the eight goal cards and reveal them in a row. That sequence is your target.

To compensate for the added difficulty, the expansion introduces spells. These are powerful actions triggered by removing cards from the discard pile. Depending on which spell you cast, you can perform a prophecy, swap two goal cards in the sequence, or discard a nightmare outright. The strategic layer this adds is genuinely satisfying. It does not increase the game length much, but it meaningfully deepens the experience.

The Book of Steps Lost and Found cards

The Glyphs

This module introduces 12 new cards: eight glyph cards (two of each colour) and four additional door cards, bringing the total doors you need to find from eight to twelve.

Glyph cards work similarly to key cards. Discarding one lets you look at the top five cards of the deck: if a door is among them, claim it immediately, then place the rest at the bottom. If there is no door, all five go to the bottom. The new glyph symbol also adds a fourth option to your labyrinth row, giving you more flexibility when building sequences.

The difficulty increase from finding twelve doors instead of eight is real, but well-balanced by the new power. A worthy addition.

The Glyphs cards

The Dreamcatchers

This expansion adds ten new cards: four lost dream cards, four dreamcatcher cards, and two fail-safe book cards. It also adds a second goal alongside finding the doors: you must catch all the lost dream cards before the game ends.

Lost dream cards behave like doors and go to limbo when drawn. But here is the twist: limbo is no longer automatically reshuffled into the deck. Instead, to move limbo cards onto a dreamcatcher (catching them), you need a freeing. Freeing happens automatically whenever an effect would shuffle limbo back (for example, during a prophecy), or you can trigger one manually by discarding a fail-safe book card. Only two of those are available, so they are precious.

If you have limbo cards but no available dreamcatcher to receive them, you suffer an overload and lose one dreamcatcher. Managing that tension, deciding when to force a freeing and when to push your luck, is what makes this expansion tick. A clever and fun module.

The Dreamcatchers cards

The Towers

This expansion adds 12 tower cards (three of each colour), shuffled into the deck. It introduces a third victory condition: by the end of the game, you must also have built a defence line of four tower cards showing all four different colours.

Tower cards cannot be added to your labyrinth row. Instead, you place them into the defence line directly from your hand. But there is a catch: each time a nightmare is triggered, you must discard one tower from the defence line unless you resolve the nightmare by reshuffling it back into the deck rather than discarding it. Once all four colours are in place and the line is complete, nightmares no longer affect it.

Tower cards also have an active power: discard one from your hand to look at the top three, four, or five cards of the deck (depending on the number printed on the card), then rearrange them in any order you choose.

I read the rules and thought this would make things easier. I was wrong. It makes the decisions harder and the game more demanding. I loved it.

The Towers cards

Happy Dreams and Dark Premonitions

This expansion adds four happy dream cards (shuffled into the deck) and eight dark premonition cards. At setup, shuffle the premonitions and reveal four face-up on the table. The remaining four form a face-down draw pile next to them.

The dark premonitions are condition cards. Each one states a specific condition, and the moment that condition is met during the game, you must resolve its penalty immediately. If multiple premonitions trigger at the same time, you choose the resolution order. If resolving one means another’s condition is no longer met, skip the second.

The penalties are punishing and all tied to the doors you unlock. One might tell you that as soon as you find two doors of the same colour, you must send one of them back to limbo. Another forces you to discard all red cards from your hand the moment you claim both red doors. A third makes you reshuffle a nightmare back into the deck. Managing the order in which you unlock doors becomes a real strategic consideration.

Happy dream cards are the counterbalance. When drawn, resolve one immediately: either discard the top dark premonition from the draw pile (removing a future threat), or take the top seven cards of the deck, discard as many as you like, and return the rest in any order. Powerful, but watch out: one premonition specifically punishes you for finding happy dreams, so be careful how you sequence your door unlocks.

A real challenge, and one of the more strategically rich expansions.

Happy Dreams and Dark Premonitions cards

Crossroads and Dead Ends

This expansion adds six crossroad cards and ten dead end cards, all shuffled into the deck.

Crossroad cards are jokers: they count as any colour, making it easier to complete sequences in your labyrinth row. Dead end cards are the opposite. They land in your hand like normal cards but cannot be played or discarded as a dream card, taking up space and reducing your options with every turn.

The dead ends can be a real pain. You end up almost wishing for a nightmare just to have a reason to discard your whole hand and start fresh. There is actually an escape action that lets you do exactly that, but the catch is that it does not resolve the nightmare: you discard your hand, draw five new cards, and the nightmare is still there waiting for you. So in my opinion the better play is to just wait for a real nightmare and use it to your advantage.

I enjoyed this one even though I lost my first game with it. It is lighter than some of the other expansions, offering a small but welcome help with the crossroads while adding a new and rather sneaky kind of pressure with the dead ends.

Crossroads and Dead Ends cards

The Door to the Oniverse

This expansion includes 16 denizen cards, from which you randomly select 8 at setup. The remaining 8 are set aside unseen. The selected denizens are shuffled into the deck along with one new multicolour door, which can be claimed by a sequence of any colour and counts toward your win condition.

When you draw a denizen card, you make a choice: keep it or discard it. Kept denizens do not count toward your hand size and accumulate without limit. To keep one, though, you must discard a dream card from your hand, which means drawing two new cards to refill, and that raises your nightmare risk considerably. At any point you can discard a kept denizen to activate its effect. Powers include playing a card that matches the last symbol in your labyrinth row (bypassing the no-repeat rule), or swapping a card from your hand with one from the discard pile.

I thought this would ease the game. It does not. It makes it more strategic, and the question of whether to purchase a denizen and accept the risk is consistently interesting.

The Door to the Oniverse cards

My Experience

I have played Onirim more than 40 times and I genuinely cannot say I am tired of it. There is something almost hypnotic about it, a quality very similar to playing Solitaire on a computer: quick to set up, easy to pick up, and yet there is always one more game to play.

That comparison is not random. Onirim genuinely reminds me of the hours I spent playing Solitaire as a kid, and I think that nostalgia plays a real role in why I fell so hard for this game.

But beyond the nostalgia, the game has real tension. Every card drawn creates a small moment of dread. When I am one sequence away from a door and I draw a nightmare, the decision of what to sacrifice is never easy. I have never once sent a door back to limbo: losing a door feels too costly, and I always try to find another way. A key in hand feels like a lifeline. Drawing a nightmare, discarding it with a key, and then immediately drawing another one is a special kind of frustration. And then the question: discard the top five cards of the deck, or sacrifice my whole hand? Discarding from the deck means losing cards I did not choose, possibly precious keys. Discarding my hand means rebuilding from scratch.

Those decisions are why I keep coming back.

Onirim Playthrough

If I had to rank the expansions today:

The Book of Steps Lost and Found
The Towers
The Glyphs
Happy Dreams and Dark Premonitions
The Door to the Oniverse
The Dreamcatchers
Crossroads and Dead Ends

But this ranking will probably shift the more I play. There is genuinely no expansion here I dislike.

What I can say is that I now add an expansion every single time I play. They are easy to understand and integrate, so there is no barrier to just picking one and adding it in. And having seven expansions in the same box is just great, you always have something different to try without having to buy more stuff. This gives the game so much life and so many hours ahead.

Playthrough with the Towers expansion

It is also worth noting: this is my go-to travel game. The box is perfectly sized, there are no pieces to lose, and you can have a full game in 15 minutes. So far only Nautilion comes close for quick play, but it has too many pieces to be practical on the go. Onirim holds that crown for now.

My Rating

Note: 8/10

Onirim is a perfect everyday game. It captures the same satisfying, slightly addictive quality of Solitaire: quick to set up, easy to learn, and hard to put down. The box is just the right size, the material quality is excellent, and I have a particular soft spot for the fold-out insert and the little Incubus token.

If you enjoy puzzles and short plays on a busy or tiring day, this game is for you. If you prefer games with strong storytelling or a rich thematic presence, it may not be what you are looking for. But if you ever loved Solitaire, I can almost guarantee you will love this too. With seven expansions in the box, there is plenty to keep you busy for a long time.

Final Thoughts

Onirim has earned a permanent place in my collection and in my heart. It is simple, tense, beautifully made, and endlessly replayable. Each expansion adds a new dimension without ever overcomplicating what makes the base game so satisfying.

I will absolutely be reviewing the other games in the Oniverse series, and playing through them for those posts will be a great excuse to spend more time with each one. Nautilion is already waiting.

Your Turn

Have you played Onirim? Do you play the base game, or do you mix in the expansions? And if you do combine them, which ones are your favourites together? I would love to hear how your experiences compare to mine! Come share your thoughts on Mastodon and Facebook.

Videos

Onirim with Seven Expansions | Playthrough | with Jason — One Stop Co-op Shop playthrough with all seven expansions and the Little Incubus at once.
Onirim - Setup & How to Play — Setup and rules video by MyklSkeleton.

Shadi Torbey on Marta's BG Corner