Game Reviews: Mensa Mind Games®, year 2007

These are Wei-Hwa Huang's personal reviews of games that might or might not have been submitted to the Mensa Mind Games event in 2007. (You'll have to go to that site to get the official list of submitted games, when they decide to post it.)

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, ratings, and reviews stated in this document and related webpages are the sole personal opinions of Wei-Hwa Huang and Wei-Hwa Huang alone. Wei-Hwa Huang does not speak for the more than 100 participants on the Mensa Mind Games selection panel. This is not an official site of Mensa Mind Games or Mensa Select, although the statements on which games are winners of Mensa Select are factually correct. Mensa Mind Games and Mensa Select are registered trademarks of American Mensa.

If you have any questions or concerns about my reviews and comments, please feel free to mail me.

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Party Games: Word-based

Head1liners (5;6;6)

*Hit or Miss (8;8;9)

Rhyme N Tyme (8;5;6)

Take Your Best Shot (8;6;10)
Party Games: Artistic skill

Luck of the Draw (4;8;4)
Party Games: A Variety of Tasks
Quiz Games

Cineplexity (8;9;6)

NAQ (8;10;7)

Numaro (4;6;4)

Take A Wild Guess (3;3;1)
"Roll Dice And Move" Games

Postcards from North America (2;7;2)

*Skullduggery (5;7;5)
Number and Math Games

Equalz (5;7;4)

Space TiVitz (5;5;7)
Word and Language Games

Bananagrams (7;9;8)

disorder (9;9;7)

Lim (Letter Cube Cards) (4;5;6)

Merriam-Webster's Word Sweep! (9;7;7)

Sneak A Peek (The Crossword Game) (6;3;4)

You've Been Sentenced! (5;6;5)

Zotto (4;5;3)
Reflex and Reaction Games

Poppo! (3;3;7)

Slap Wacky! (5;3;2)

Three of a Crime (7;8;8)

Toppo (9;9;8)
Dexterity Games

Kippit (8;8;9)

Shakedown (6;5;6)
Strategy Card Games

Abridged (7;9;5)

Ka-Ching! (9;9;10)

Margin for Error (8;9;5)
Strategy Dice Games
Family Strategy ("German") Games

*Gheos (8;9;9)

Aussie Rules Super Subsistence Farmer (10;9;2)

Medici vs. Strossi (7;8;8)

Treasure Fleet (8;8;6)
Abstract Strategy Games -- Pure Abstract

Babylon (5;4;4)

Cover Up (4;3;7)

Mix-Up (8;7;9)

Newton's Apples (3;4;5)

Project Kells - Tara (6;6;10)

Skybridge (3;4;7)

Spin & Trap (2;2;7)
Abstract Strategy Games -- Luck or Hidden Information

Bendomino (6;5;8)

Cromlet (6;8;6)

*Gemlok (7;7;8)

Mimic (3;5;2)

Quirky (4;4;6)

*Qwirkle (8;9;10)

24/7 the Game (7;7;10)
War or Combat Games

HeroCard: Cyberspace (5;7;6)

HeroCard: Rise of the Shogun (5;7;5)
One Player Games

Aqube (1;1;3)

Blik-Blok (1;3;1)

Cliko (6;2;5)

Cover Your Tracks (5;1;6)

Logic Links (2;1;1)

Meta-Forms (6;2;5)

Noodlers (3;1;2)

Zoologic (7;2;4)
Games With Original Themes

Kingka (2;2;6)

Yamodo! (1;1;3)

Lim (Letter Cube Cards)

(search on Board Game Geek)

Replay Value (1-10): 4
Fun Factor (1-10): 5
Worth Buying (1-10): 6

This game comes with some rather interesting cards that are two-dimensional projections of cubes. The basic idea is to connect these cubes into a structure so that words can be read along the faces of the cubes, mostly by an "ant-crawl heuristic" (two letters are adjacent if an ant could conceivable crawl from one letter to the next) although one is also allowed to tunnel through the cubes to get to the letters on the other side.

If technology were sufficiently advanced so that it was easy to create cubes that can float in the air, this game would work perfectly fine with 52 such letter cubes. But technology isn't advanced like that, and so this game has to make do with these translucent hexagons. Unfortunately, very few people seemed to be able to visualize the floating cubes the hexagons were supposed to represent, and although the rules made a heroic effort to explain it, almost everyone I talked with just didn't get this game.

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By Wei-Hwa Huang