Practice Virtù in the Italian Renaissance, and Help Others Explore the Unconscious Mind

It's a time of upheaval, when the Middle Ages end and modernity is born. For those in the government, the situation is ripe for action. Your city must maintain its standing, and you, as its prince, must make this happen.

Virtù takes place during the Italian Renaissance, with each player embodying one of the powerful Italian cities of the time and trying to make it more powerful than all others through "virtù", the ability to accomplish great things through a strong state (according to Machiavelli).

The foundation of the game is "wheelbuilding", that is, creating a "wheel of actions" on your personal player board, which has a unique arrangement compared to other players and with you having a different set of starting family cards. Depending on how you place the cards, you have multiple options available and a starting strategy, but you can acquire and place new cards to alter your approach over the course of the game. You interact with others indirectly by taking cards they want or racing to goals or directly by sending agents to the palace or their cities as well as by attacking cities. Artists, merchants, and diplomats can also work to increase your prestige.


Virtù includes a two-player mode that is played differently from the game with 3-5 players.

Vienna in the early 1900s: The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud established a revolutionary set of theories and therapeutic techniques called psychoanalysis, which are related to the study of the unconscious mind.

From the autumn of 1902, a number of followers who expressed interest in Freud's work were invited to meet at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon to discuss psychology and neuropathology. This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society, and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement. In 1908, reflecting its growing institutional status, the Wednesday group was reconstituted as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society with Freud as president.


As a member of this society in Unconscious Mind, a game that blends worker placement, engine building, multi-use cards, and action programming, your goal is to master therapeutic techniques, establish a practice, and grow your clientele. By delving into your patients' dreams — their unconscious minds — you can help them recover from various complexes and traumas. In turn, the people you heal will live happier and more productive lives.

In more detail, each turn you activate all of the therapeutic technique cards you have in a given row of your notebook, marked by your ink-pot. Then, you send a figure to one of the various action spaces in Vienna — spending time and moving your ink-pot to pay the costs, which determines which row of your notebook will be activated at the start of your next turn. Over the course of the game, your office will be visited by many Viennese citizens, and once they have been healed, they can happily return to their occupations — which opens up more action spaces in Vienna for players to use. Along the way, you may compile your knowledge and submit a thesis to gain additional rewards. After a number of rounds, scores are tallied, and the player with the most points wins!