The Mind And The Heart (but the card games)
If you don’t already know what it is, The Mind is a 2018 card game with a mechanical system so seemingly simple as to seem nonexistent. There’s a deck of cards that just show a bunch of numbers. You shuffle up the cards, deal some of them out, and then, without communicating, each player lays out the cards they have, into a stack, in order. And you may think ‘that sounds easy’ but it’s fiendishly engaging because you’re all playing into the same stack and the only information people are getting from one another is the timing of the playing of the cards. There’s more to it than that, but the core of the game is just that: playing cards from your hand based on your ability to determine that you think it’s the lowest available card, with only intuitive communication and timing to assist you.
I find this system really interesting because it really does put paid to how simple a game system can be when there’s machinery holding onto the memory and the game state – the cards communicate for the players, they remember for the players and the game personalises itself really quickly. If I can play The Mind with my mum and sister that’s a different game with different invisible communication and timing than the game to the one I play with my niblings. It creates the phenomenon of people feeling psychic and feeling clever that they managed something, but also not at all feeling hard done by when they fail because the game is so hard when viewed outside of those moments of intuition.
Hearts, if you’re not familiar with it, is a trick-taking game, a few hundred years old, but differing from most of the well-known examples of the genre because it’s a trick evasion game. In Hearts, you do the standard trick taking game things, where you need to play out cards into a trick to folllow suit, but if you wind up winning a trick where hearts are the suit, you eat a penalty. This means strategically the best way to play the game is to try and avoid ever winning any tricks, because the penalties from the hearts overwhelm any points you could be getting by any other means.
And the two games just coincidentally are named while I think about simple card games about romance.
