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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IntroductionWei-Hwa's report and reviews of the games at Mensa Mind Games in San Diego, California, in the year 2010. I might have played the games at that event. Sometimes I played the games at other gatherings. Each game has some photos, followed by a paragraph of description, some ratings, and a paragraph of commentary.I played most of these games in 35 hours. I've rated each game with three values from 1 to 10: replay value (how often could I play it?), fun factor (how often do I want to play it?), and worth buying (how badly do I want to own my own copy? are there any cool bits?). An asterisk (*) represents a winner of the Mensa Select Award. The "Worth Buying" rating is based on my assessment of the game's quality, originality, and how easy it is to duplicate the experience with components found around the house. My text reviews tend to lean towards the game experience, which I find to be more important than discussions of the components, especially since game components can often get revised or changed. What this means is that since the components can often be improved in later editions of the game, you should take that "Worth Buying" number with a grain of salt, especially if the rating is low. What's "MMG Popularity Rank"? Well, there are two numbers after that rank. The first is the order in which the first copy of the game was taken at the lottery giveaway at the end of the Mind Games event. That tends to represent a game's specific appeal -- the games that everyone hates will have a low rank. The second is the order in which the last copy of the game was taken. This will be correlated with a game's general appeal -- the games that are generally popular will have a high number. This is only a rough estimate of popularity, of course, since for all we know the five big fans of the worst game could've gotten lucky and had their names called first. But it's not a bad first approximation. Overall ImpressionsMaybe just me, but the crop this year seemed to have a much larger variety of companies than in previous years, and a lot more games are from one-game companies. This is good for the industry, because there's a bit more variety, but bad for the individual companies as it's pretty darned hard to make it on just one game in a market with so much competition. The companies are also a bit wiser now, knowing to submit games that are more easily evaluated over a short period of time.
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