Thursday, September 27, 2018

Dave Reviews: Numbers, Used Poorly

The Mind

Can you read your friends' minds?!

No. Stop trying. And if you do want to try, find another way.


This is what you do in The Mind: Everyone has a hand of cards equal to the level of the game. One person plays a card. Then another. Do that until everyone's hands are empty. The goal is to play the cards, numbered 1 through 99, in numerical order while hardcore pokerfacing everybody at the table. You cannot speak, you cannot make expressions that potentially give away any information about your hand, nothing. (Of course, that's necessary, since clues would make this game idiotically simple.)

Your group starts with a certain number of lives and throwing stars. As you pass through the levels, more of these become available. Lives are lost if someone plays a card and another player has a lower card in hand; throwing stars are used to allow everyone to discard one card from their hands. Run out of lives, you lose. Get to the end with any lives left, you win.

If you're familiar with The Game, this is extremely similar, just with slight tweaks to make it more engaging. Its main advantage over The Game is this: The Game requires you to go through the whole deck, which means a bad shuffle can make it extremely difficult to finish. The Mind never has you deal out more than about one-third of the deck, so while you certainly can end up with a bunch of cards with similar values spread among the players, it's less of a problem.

Problem is, they're just tweaks, and it's not much more engaging. The instructions have a bit that say "Don't read until you've finished a game", at which point they say this is a game about timing—the longer you wait to play a card, the farther away from the current card you probably are, so the players need to get a sense for how long each other will wait before playing a card X number away from the current one. They're not lying; that's what this game is, to the point that's basically all this game is.

This is the kind of game that might have value with kids who need to learn teamwork, especially if you need them to shut the fuck up for five minutes. And there will always be people who enjoy this specific brand of mental cooperation. But as a game, it's just.. not much of one.

Score: Six beers—the number it would probably take for me to enjoy this.

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