Game Reviews: Mensa Mind Games®, year 2007

Postcards from North America

• Replay Value (1-10): 2
• Fun Factor (1-10): 7
• Worth Buying (1-10): 2

This game comes with a large board that is basically a hexagonal grid overlaid over North America. There are multiple landmarks on the board, each one with a corresponding fake postcard. Each player is deal 5 postcards at random, and on your turn you roll a die and start making your way towards one of those locations. When you reach a location, you score it and get a new postcard. First person to score 9 locations wins!

The movement mechanics of this game are supposed to be simple but appear to have design flaws. The idea is that there are red, blue, and yellow spaces on the board, and that when you roll, say, a red face on a die, you can move as many red spaces as you like. This means that there's no real functional difference between a red path with 20 spaces and a red path with 2 spaces, which makes me wonder why they went with a hex grid in the first place instead of a simpler node-and-colored-edge map. Overall, this game was a lot of "boy, I need to roll a blue to make progress! [rolls] Aw, no blue. Your turn!" There was very little overall strategy, and our group found it more fun to make fun of the game than derive fun from the game. There are supposedly amusing texts on the back of the postcards, but they tended to be pithy, schmaltzy, and fake.