With the interminable confinement due to the pandemic, I indulged a fair bit for Christmas. Of the games “I gave” my kids, this one as certainly the highlight.
It is not a children’s game per se, but our six year old daughter picked it up immediately, same with my mother in law.
And also my wife, who exclaimed it was the dumbest game that I’d ever inflicted on her when I explained the rules to her.
We take our cards and play them out to a shared pile in the middle, in numerical order. No talking.
The beauty of The Mind is that it recreates the sensation of dread and anticipation you feel during an opponent’s final turn right at the end of a tight game – for the entire bleeping game!
I never conceptualized that it was possible for a game could create and maintain this tension. Certainly not a game with such a simple elegant ruleset. Of course, it is most likely works only because it is so simple.
Ultimately, I suspect this game will end up in Hanabi territory – taking numbered cards and simply doing something simultaneously absurd and sublime with it.
In the months after writing this note, I have consistently brought it to the in-laws house during our weekly visits, and we have consistently not played it. Then again we haven’t played many games lately at their house. At home, my I Ching obsession has eliminated my entreaties to my wife to play games with me. So the high opinion of the design still stands, but it’s not getting nearly as much love as I would have expected.