I went to bed very early last Wednesday night, woke up about midnight, and was on the road before 1:30 am on Thursday. A weird time of day to leave, but in terms of traffic, it was wonderful. I got through the northeast metroplex, and was south of Washington, DC, before 6:00 am, before the traffic started to flow. I took a couple of longer-than-average rest breaks, and still rolled into the hotel’s parking lot in Charlotte, North Carolina, a few minutes before noon.

Mensa Mind Games—to bring you all up to speed—is an annual weekend gathering of Mensans. But unlike our Regional Gatherings or the Annual Gathering, Mind Games has a specific purpose, and no other programming. Games manufacturers submit their newest and best board games to Mensa for our review and judging. Attendees (the Mensan judges) promise to read the instructions, set up and play the game, and then rank it in five categories and offer commentary. (Those five categories are Aesthetics, Instructions [clarity, completeness, brevity], Originality, Play Appeal, and Play Value [can you play the game multiple times? Do you want to?].) At the end of the weekend, the player-judges vote for their seven favorites, and the top five are awarded the Mensa Select seal.

I had never attended Mind Games before, so I decided this was the year. There are a lot of members for whom Mind Games is the only event they attend each year, but it is a must-do for them; they love it. And I can see the appeal. On the other hand, the weekend was also incredibly tiring and intense, because giving due diligence to all the games can take a considerable amount of effort and time (for instance, a game that should take 60–90 minutes to play may also require an hour or more of reading the instructions, and then another half hour setting up the game, and that time estimate is usually for someone who has played the game before… so the actual time spent on any one game may be twice that estimate or more).

This year, there were 47 games submitted, though I gather that in most years, that number is closer to 60. When checking in, we each got lists of 30 games we were expected to play, as well as another list of the other 17 games, in case we had time/wanted to play them as well, to comment (votes are only taken from member-judges on the 30 assigned games; we all get different lists, so all the games get ample consideration). The game-playing is scheduled to start at 4:00 pm on Thursday, but we were able to get in and get gaming earlier, about 1:00. Before the gaming, a crew of volunteers had “fluffed” the games: unwrapped them, separated out any pieces that needed to be separated, sorted those pieces (usually into little plastic bags), and stacked the games in alphabetical order on the long table in the center of the room.

Once game-playing begins, judges find a game to play, people to play with, and get to it. I connected with three people I already knew—and knew to be good game players (no speed bumps in this crowd)—with whom I shared about half my list. It was their recommendation to start with the longest games requiring the most players, because it would be easier to find just one or two others for the smaller, quicker games later in the weekend. The first we attempted was a game for 4–6 players and 60–90 minutes. A fifth player joined us. After an hour of reading the instructions and setting up the initial game configuration, we jumped in. It was a long slog, just to get through the first round of turns, whereupon our fifth decided she understood the game, and chose to drop out and find another. But the game took a sharp turn on the third turn, and we played it out. It did not appeal to any of us. Indeed, the first four I played were less than thrilling. But eventually, I did come across several that were very good, that really caught my interest.

I played until 2:00 am Friday, got a few hours of sleep, took a quick swim and breakfast, and then it was back to the gaming. Friday I played until 3:00 am, and then Saturday was nearly the same. The last game on my list, late Saturday evening, was a one-player game designed for 8–to–12 year-olds (there were several that were for children, but we had to evaluate them as games themselves, as in “would you buy this for a child of that age?”). It, too, was a long slog, and ultimately unsatisfying (to me), though I did hear a child in the target age-range say it was her favorite. Oh, yes: member-judges ranged from probably 6 years old to well into their 80s.

After each game, I completed the comment card (with both the rankings and my comments). One comment I could have made (but didn’t) on nearly half the games I judged was “hire an editor!” The instructions, in many cases, were terrible. Misspelled words, grammar trouble, and poor punctuation were the least of it. Missing words and fuzzy instructions were far worse. And then—a trend in modern game design, apparently—the tediously long back-story to justify the design of the game, but which has no effect whatsoever on the game play. It’s bad enough if it’s the first half of the instructions one has to slog through to get to the instructions on how to play, but some of them decided to interleave the story with the instructions throughout the booklet. Oh, and another pet peeve: the instructions that walk us through setting up the game and playing the game, and only at the end talk about the object, how to win. A brief note up front on how to win—in other words, why one is playing the game—would greatly help many of them.

And one of the games I played said it was for 2–4 players. But the two-player version requires a non-player character, which is laid out in the instructions. Unfortunately, I chose to play that game in the two-player version, and the NPC was not fully fleshed out, not properly designed, so the game was not very enjoyable (actually, it didn’t seem to work, which was disappointing, because I liked the design and concept, and really wanted to like the game). But late Saturday, I had the opportunity to play it again with two others, and the game was much better, much easier to understand.

Saturday night/Sunday morning, the ballots are counted and the games are repackaged. At 10:00 Sunday, the winners are announced, and then the game give-away takes place. The names of the attendees have by this point been randomized, and they are read out, one at a time. The named person calls out the game he wants, and the next name is read (while runners deliver the games). I didn’t get one of the five winners, but I did get a game from the top of my list. I picked up a copy of Philosophy, a two-player strategy game (with a too-long back-story) with interesting game play. Players take turns placing tiles in the center nine squares of a board. Each tile can affect a tile next to it in a specific way (pushing the other tile this way or that, and so forth, which may push the next tile). The object is to get three in a row (the board is larger than three-by-three, but players can only place tiles in that three-by-three section). A seemingly key feature is that moving an opponent’s tile may also force one of the player’s tiles to move, which would enable it to take effect again, but I’ve now played the game six times, and that chain-reaction only occurred once or twice.

The winners of this year’s Mensa Select seal are (in alphabetical order): Abducktion, First in Flight, In the Footsteps of Darwin, The Vale of Eternity, and Wandering Towers.

Abducktion is a cute, easy strategy game in which each player has a small board with twelve spaces in sequence, each of which holds one of four different colors of duck. Using a hand of three cards that direct how to move one’s ducks (swap two, rotate a square of four, remove three and replace them, swap with one on another player’s board, etc.), each player in turn tries to form a pattern of ducks that matches one of three revealed pattern cards (worth varying amounts of points). At the end of one’s turn, the ducks on the card flow down to fill empty spaces, and then more ducks are added at the top of the card, the player’s hand is replenished to three movement cards, and the patterns are replenished to three. The game ends when all the pattern cards have been claimed.

First in Flight is the game I mentioned, which played poorly with two players, but well with three. It’s a deck-building game, themed on the early days of heavier-than-air powered flight. Pretty pieces, nice design, just make sure to play it in groups of three or four.

In the Footsteps of Darwin is one of those where the back story seems a bit longer than it needs to be. Each player, each turn, claims an animal card or an explorer card, which are worth either points or other features that can be multiplied into points. Certain combinations earn one multipliers or bonus points for certain sets of claimed cards.

The Vale of Eternity, too, is a deck-building game, of sorts. Each turn, players buy cards which can be played to earn points or money to buy others. Some cards can be removed after playing, but many remain in the played position on the board (which has a limited, though increasing turn-by-turn, number of spots in which to play cards). This game comes with a stand-up creature to be placed in the middle of the scoring board. The instructions note that the creature “makes for a more interesting picture when you take a picture of the game,” but otherwise is not part of the game.

Wandering Towers is the one of the five that was not on my list, so I didn’t play it. I probably could have found time to play it late Saturday night, but at that point, there were 17 games I hadn’t played, and I had no idea which would win… and I was played out!

It was a fascinating experience.

Sunday afternoon (as well as intermittently during the weekend), there was Mensa business discussion (because such always crop up when I’m with other officers of the organization), so I didn’t leave the hotel until after 4:30 Sunday afternoon. And then, because I was already half-way here, I continued south, and drove to Florida to visit my parents in their winter abode. Remember, I’d had about three hours of sleep each of the previous three nights. So I was kind of wrung out. I stopped a couple of times to walk around, and closed my eyes for a few minutes at a rest area in South Carolina. But just over the border into Florida, at the first rest area, I felt the need to close my eyes again. Those few minutes turned into seven hours of sleep in the car. Then I continued the drive in the morning light on down to Delray Beach, where I am now safe and sound and enjoying this quasi-vacation (while trying to do some work as well). I’ll head back north in a few days, and if any of you have read this far, I’ll be on the road up the east coast probably Monday and Tuesday, looking for reasons to pause and rest. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and home. At least, that’s my current plan, though traffic conditions could conceivably push me farther west.