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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Abridged (7;9;5)

Aqube (1;1;3)

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

Babylon (5;4;4)

Bananagrams (7;9;8)

Bendomino (6;5;8)

Blik-Blok (1;3;1)

Cineplexity (8;9;6)

Cliko (6;2;5)

Cover Up (4;3;7)

Cover Your Tracks (5;1;6)

Cromlet (6;8;6)

disorder (9;9;7)

Equalz (5;7;4)

*Gemlok (7;7;8)

*Gheos (8;9;9)

Head1liners (5;6;6)

HeroCard: Cyberspace (5;7;6)

HeroCard: Rise of the Shogun (5;7;5)

*Hit or Miss (8;8;9)

Ka-Ching! (9;9;10)

Kingka (2;2;6)

Kippit (8;8;9)

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

Logic Links (2;1;1)

Luck of the Draw (4;8;4)

Margin for Error (8;9;5)

Medici vs. Strossi (7;8;8)

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

Meta-Forms (6;2;5)

Mimic (3;5;2)

Mix-Up (8;7;9)

NAQ (8;10;7)

Newton's Apples (3;4;5)

Noodlers (3;1;2)

Numaro (4;6;4)

Poppo! (3;3;7)

Postcards from North America (2;7;2)

Project Kells - Tara (6;6;10)

Quirky (4;4;6)

*Qwirkle (8;9;10)

Rhyme N Tyme (8;5;6)

Shakedown (6;5;6)

*Skullduggery (5;7;5)

Skybridge (3;4;7)

Slap Wacky! (5;3;2)

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

Space TiVitz (5;5;7)

Spin & Trap (2;2;7)

Take A Wild Guess (3;3;1)

Take Your Best Shot (8;6;10)

Three of a Crime (7;8;8)

Toppo (9;9;8)

Treasure Fleet (8;8;6)

24/7 the Game (7;7;10)

Yamodo! (1;1;3)

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

Zoologic (7;2;4)

Zotto (4;5;3)

Cover Your Tracks

(search on Board Game Geek)

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

This puzzle game from Thinkfun seems simple enough -- there is a square grid with certain areas marked with "tracks", and four big plastic pieces made up of squares. Put the big plastic pieces into the grid such that all those "tracks" are covered up. Simple in presmise, but the oddly-shaped pieces guarantee that even the easy puzzles are not as trivial as they seem.

I first saw this puzzle years ago as a prototype with only 10 challenges, and it's good to see a commercial version of this that I can now buy and take home. However, be warned that this is probably one of the harder puzzles in Binary Arts' collection (not counting the one that yours truly had a hand in), and that there often isn't a systematic way to find a working solution to a given problem.

Especially the last challenge in the set, which I suspect few people will ever come close to solving on their own after solving all the previous ones.

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By Wei-Hwa Huang