The Mind: Review
A wink and a nod; The simple mechanic of silence.
Box Art
Created By: Wolfgang Warsch Published by: Pandasaurus Games
In 1843 Samuel Morse developed the telegraph. It’s purpose facilitated communication over great distances bridging the gap between towns, cities and eventually countries. What took hours or days for a rider “heyaa-ing”, spurring on the fastest pony around, the telegraph could do in minutes. Communication changed. The world changed.
Since the invention of Morse code and the telegraph, sending fragmented dots and dashes over copper cables in the mid-1800s to the instantaneous gratification of deploying a slew of emojis to friends half way around the world via our personal phones, humans have relied on expanding technology to pontificate what makes our species incredibly unique. Expression, information, connection, soul surfing from friend, to family and maybe even to foe, we deliver our ideas in the form of the spoken or written word.
The Mind, however, will strip you of all that. Can you get to the next level only with the power of a raised eye brow? We shall see.
how high can you go
The Mind may be an understated game at first glance. With such simple rules it might be mistaken as a light filler game without much fanfare. You’d be wrong on that assessment. In fact, this is probably one of the hardest games to “win” I’ve ever played. For the uninitiated, The Mind is a co-op game that has two simple mechanics: each player must place correctly, one by one, their cards in ascending order onto a middle pile. There is no set order when a player can place their card on the pile, just as long as it’s ascending in order. The second mechanic…well, I’ll discuss that in a bit.
The deck is made of 100 cards, numbered 1 through 100. Depending on the number of players, the game is split up a certain number of rounds, each with a specific number of cards in each player’s hand, i.e. round 1 has one card in each player’s hand, round 2 has two cards in a hand, and so on. As these rounds progress there is also ways to gain extra lives and shuriken, which are cards you can use to discard specific numbers from your hand. Manage to go through the entire game without misplacing one card cutting in front of another in order, and you win The Mind!!
This all sounds too simple to be compelling enough for a second run. Well, the small nugget that makes this all so, so hard is that you must go through this entire process without talking, or even giving out obvious body signals. In fact, as the game’s moto endorses; let your minds become one. And you’ll need to if you wish to get anywhere near the higher rounds.
Components
comfortably numb
The Mind becomes a challenging endeavor when you lose the ability to vocally communicate when to place down cards in order. Instead, as stated above, you have to feel when the cards must be placed down—but how you feel might totally be out of sync with your fellow players. They are also fidgeting uncontrollably messaging hard with their eyes that they have a low number they’d like to get rid off before anyone else. In this weird way, The Mind is a giant game of reverse chicken, where you want your partners to not break composure and allow you to be the one to break because somehow, deep down, you think you have a lower numbered card you just have to jettison immediately onto the table. These decisions are sometimes made in a matter of seconds leaving you open to being left behind if you don’t act fast enough.
The counter weight pulling you in the other direction is the doubt that, gosh darn it, maybe you don’t have the lowest card, and Sarah’s dancing eyebrows are trying really hard to discourage you from putting whatever you have down—and yet, you both could be wrong and Pedro is just as terrified to place his card down even though he is the one holding the lowest card out of the lot of you.
It’s amazing how a little mechanic of silence can festoon all the players into a garland of doubt and paranoia. Each card successfully dumped onto the ever growing pile of numbers in the middle is a small sigh of relief, if ever fleeting as the next number comes up that must be discarded and timed correctly. As the cards increase in you hand and the large buffer of absent space between numbers shrink, all those cozy feelings from the easier rounds start to fade—and it’s great.
If you ever manage to cross a rather difficult round and come out at the other side with all cards correctly placed, everyone on the table will probably erupt in laughter and relief. I’ve experienced that and I can say, it’s definitely a joy I haven’t see in other games.
The Pile
Group think
The Mind is an interesting game. It surpasses its initial presentation—it’s not going to win any awards for art style or component quality—and surprises you with a clever mechanic: silence. Just having that manages to elevate a mundane game design into a fun game tenfold.
I would say, this is also a very group dependent game. If your friends and family can buy in into the being quiet aspect, you can have a very good time. However, if people constantly talk and give away obvious clues as to what they have in their hand, the game quickly loses its drive. A very chatty group probably wouldn’t be the best conduit for this game—and that’s okay. If that’s the natural state of your play group, fighting and running counter to that probably would negate what makes your group click, so be aware of that.
If your group is of the other ilk, and can find fun in the silence of The Mind, then I’m sure you’ll find this to be an excellent game to have in your library. It’s accessible to a lot of different players, both new to the tabletop scene and veterans alike, and the price point is just right. It’s also extremely portable, so sticking this in the pocket of a bookbag to take out at lunch time is easily doable.
Overall, this is an easy game to recommend. If you like a unique idea that deviates from the normal fare, The Mind will change things up a bit. Go get it.
To Consider
+ Easy to teach and play
+ Great price point; can easily find it under $15 (USD)
+ Can play a quick game under 20 minutes
+/- It’s group dependent. If your group likes to talk, bottling them up might not mesh well with this game.
+/- It’s hard to win. If you’re up for a challenge this might be the game for you but frustration might set it for those competitive players
- Build quality is basic
