That's The Mind. Which has now spawned The Mind Extreme.
The Mind is a fantastic little cooperative card game with simple rules. Players are dealt cards from a deck of numbers 1 through 100. Without speaking to each other, they must play all the cards together in a single pile, in increasing order. There are a few wrinkles to that, but the core concept is that simple. And it's deceptive just how much fun that actually is, and how much of a challenge it can be. I've played The Mind dozens upon dozens of times: questing with the same group to complete all its levels, trying it with different mixes of friends to see how it affects the experience, and even playing it at a convention with people I don't often get to see. The Mind is always a fun experience, and succeeding at it feels great.
Naturally, the world would seem to need a sequel. But The Mind Extreme can't help but be worse than its predecessor. And the core problem is really that there just isn't much you could do to add to that original experience that doesn't diminish it.
The Mind Extreme divides that 100-card deck in two: there are white cards and red cards both, each numbered 1 through 50. Your job each round is to play the white cards in one pile in ascending order, and the red cards in a different pile in descending order. With your focus split in two places, mistakes are more likely. Getting a sense of the gaps between numbers -- is it time for me to play this card yet? -- is harder. It's definitely "Extreme," but it isn't necessarily any more fun.
Still, that alone wouldn't be that much lesser a different experience than The Mind. Which I can imagine was the problem during the design process. I envision playtesters talking around a table saying: "Yeah, but it's all the same rules, just with two half-decks shuffled together. That's not really different enough from The Mind, is it?" I can imagine designer Wolfgang Warsch, the man whose recent games come loaded with extra mini-expansions, looking at that and thinking, "this really isn't different enough!"
So The Mind Extreme adds another element: some rounds require you to play the cards in one or both of the stacks face down. You play through the entire level, then flip the stack over at the end to see whether you got everything in the right order (losing one "life" in total if there are any mistakes). My group found this to be an utterly uninteresting element in the game, going so far as to simply ignore it after one or two playthroughs. It's all but impossible to play a face down stack in the right order, succeeding at it isn't actually that big a thrill (since it feels close to random), and being able to mess it up as much as you want while only losing one life isn't enough of a deterrent to make you really care to try to get right. It's simply a moment in the game where "now we lose one life." The "split deck" aspect of the game at least still taps into what made The Mind compelling. The face down aspect misses the thrill of the original entirely.
The Mind was a game my group played compulsively for many months on end. I suppose you could use the fact that we did stop as evidence that an expansion/sequel was needed. And yet, having now sampled The Mind Extreme, I'm not sure we'll be playing it much. There's no siren lure to beat all its levels as there was for the first one. It's the sequel you may have thought you wanted that probably shouldn't have been made.
Even though it's firmly in the shadow of its parent, I couldn't go so far as to call The Mind Extreme a "bad" game. Particularly if you play without the face down element, you do still get some thrills, enough that I'd probably call it a B-. I would play it, every now and then, given that there's a copy now within my gaming circle. But the simple truth is, if you don't own The Mind, you should buy that. And if you do, then you don't need this.
No comments:
Post a Comment