Game Reviews: Mensa Mind Games®, year 2007

Head1liners

• Replay Value (1-10): 5
• Fun Factor (1-10): 6
• Worth Buying (1-10): 6

In this party game, each player is shown a photograph, and must write an appropriate newspaper headline that would match the photograph. Everybody's headlines are all pooled together, and everybody (except the "Editor", who is reading the headlines out loud) votes on a headline (you can't vote on your own). You get one point for every vote your headline receives. Once you get a certain number of points, you get an extra restriction that your headline has to fullfill (e.g., "Local News").

This is a reasonable premise, but there are a few things about the design of this game that irk me. One basic problem is that in actual newspapers, headlines aren't written for photographs; they're written for articles. Captions are written for photographs. I think my biggest piece of annoyance, though, is that almost all of the photographs supplied with the game are stock photos, which unfortunately are not quite the same genre as news photos. (When was the last time you saw a news photo of two kids taking a bath in an old metal washtub?) Some of the other problems I don't like are that real news headlines are usually read visually, not out loud, and that the "editor vs. writer" metaphor the rules are using feels unrealistic and constrained. All this creates a lack of verisimilitude that detracts from the game just enough that I feel I didn't quite have fun playing it. Would this game have gotten a better review from me if it was called "Write a Funny Caption"? Perhaps, perhaps.