Over the last couple of years I have been introduced to two card games with a similar theme - co-operating to play numbered cards in an increasing sequence - but with very different approaches. This article considers The Mind, a game of group rapport and intuition, where players must sense the right moment to play their cards. Hanabi, described in Part 1 of this series, is a game of deduction.
Image retrieved from Pandasaurus Games - The Mind
The Mind, like Hanabi, is a co-operative game. The players work together, and succeed or fail, as a team rather than as individual - they are competing against the structure of the game, rather than with each other. And in both games, each player has different information, and the channels by which they can share information with each other is strictly limited by the game rules.
The Mind - an overview
The publisher’s page about the The Mind includes a link to The Mind’s rulebook. The description below is an overview of the game - it is not intended to provide full details of the rules, but to provide enough of an introduction to discuss the principles.
At the beginning of the game, the team of players are given a number of lives equal to the number of players. These can be lost during the game, and the game ends when the final life is lost. They also receive one “throwing star”, which they can invoke when they choose.
The game is played with a deck of cards numbered from 1 to 100. Play progresses through a number of levels, starting at level 1 and progressing - unless the players lose all their lives first - to the final level of 8, 10, or 12 depending on the number of players (a larger group will face fewer levels). At certain levels, the players receive either an extra life or an extra throwing star.
At the start of each level, each player is dealt a hand of cards which only they can look at, with the number of cards in the hand being the level number (e.g. at the start of level 3, each player is dealt 3 cards).
The players then signal their readiness to start the round, and play begins.
The objective is simple - the players complete the level if all players successfully play all the cards in their hand on to the discard pile (which starts empty). There are no turns - any player can play a card (face-up) on to the discard pile whenever they like.
But the cards have to go on the discard pile in ascending order. If another player plays a card and you can see that you still have a lower-numbered card in your hand (i.e. if you have a card which has missed its chance and which can no longer be played under the “ascending order” rule), then you have to call “stop!”, one of the team’s lives is lost, and play continues.
And players must not disclose any of their card values or show them to other players.
So play consists of looking around the table at your fellow players wondering “Is this the moment to play my next card - or should I wait a bit more in case someone else has a lower one which I need to let them play first?” And the key to success is having a shared sense of how to time those decisions.
The other action which players can take is to decide, unanimously, to play a “throwing star”. This allows each player to immediately discard their lowest card without risk of penalty, and the game continues from that point - so this could be helpful if the players have hit an impasse.
Image retrieved from Pandasaurus Games - The Mind
Basic tactics
Should you play or should you wait? The natural strategy is to see how big a gap there is between the last card played on to the discard pile and the lowest card in your hand, and base your waiting on that - the bigger the gap, the longer you wait. For example:
- If your smallest card is 21, and a 20 has just been played - then you know for sure that your card has to be the next one, so play it. (And play it fast, before someone else turns out to have 22 and is thinking “That’s probably the next one, so I should play it now”!)
- If your smallest card is 80, the most recent card played on the discard pile is 20, and the other players have plenty of cards - then the chances are that someone else has a card which falls between 20 and 80, so you should give them a while to play. However, if none of them are playing either and you’re all waiting for each other - maybe all their cards happen to be in the 80s or 90s, so eventually maybe you’ll need to give in and play…
More cards, more difficulty? At higher levels, there are more cards to be played, so more chances for something to go wrong before you reach the end of the level. But as the number of cards increases, the decisions can get easier. The unknowns you face are twofold - what cards were dealt from the deck to the other players as a whole (as opposed to those which remain in the deck), and how were those cards allocated between the other players. And at higher levels, the uncertainty of the pool of cards can start to diminish. At the extreme - if every card in the deck was dealt (e.g. if you were trying to play, beyond the rules, with 10 players at level 10), then you’d know that if you didn’t have the “last card + 1” in your hand, then it must be in someone else’s - so you know that the correct move is to to wait for them to play it.
Synchronising minds - without ruining the game
Of course, everyone will have a different view of how long they should wait, particularly when first playing the game or playing with a new group.
If you had the equivalent of the system clock of a computer helping to synchronise, not the various components on a circuit board, but the brains around the table, then the game could be rendered trivial:
- Tick: If anyone has a 1, they play it, otherwise they all wait.
- Tick: If anyone has a 2, they play it, otherwise they all wait.
- Tick: If anyone has a 3, they play it, otherwise they all wait…
All you’d need would be a loud clock on the wall and an agreement between the players on strategy - but as that would reduces the game to a mechanical exercise in counting, you may not want to do that ;-)
As the tips at the end of the game rules explain:
It should be emphasised at this point that this is not a question of counting off the seconds. There is no counting. Of course, time passes by “in the head” of each player, but this is normally quicker than one second per number and it changes depending on what level is being played. The secret of the game is developing that collective feeling for “now is the moment”. The team has to work in harmony. The team has to become ONE!
And that’s where the fun is :-)
Comment on this article on Twitter:
Part 2 of my blog post on co-operative counting games - "The Mind" by @PandasaurusGame. A game of rapport and intuition with some counterintuitive complexity - and how you could break the game with a ticking clock (but in a co-op game, what's the point?!) https://t.co/JvdinMaBMU pic.twitter.com/3oZApUCNlZ
— Terry Boon (@terryboon) January 19, 2022
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