• By Jenny Williams
• April 20, 2010  |
• 8:00 am  |
• Categories: Armchair Geek

American Mensa has been holding its “Mind Games” competition each year since 1990 to select five new games from a group of about 50 or 60 submitted by manufacturers. Those five winners earn the right to display the Mensa Select Seal.

The games are selected by a group of Mensans who love to play board games. They spend a whole weekend learning, playing and evaluating the games submitted, ranking their favorites by the end of the weekend. Each participant has 30 games assigned to them to rate and vote on. They are also able to play any of the other games if they so choose.

Mind Games is a crazy-fun weekend of nothing but game playing with people who truly love board games. I just got back Sunday night from attending this year’s Mind Games in San Diego, California. Yes, I’m sleep deprived. Yes, I had a great time. Yes, I plan on buying a bunch of new games. Yes, I want to go every year, but no, I can’t afford it. Next year’s Mind Games competition will be held in Albany, New York.

Past winners of the Mensa Select Seal include the familiar (Taboo, Scattergories, Trivial Pursuit: Genus Edition, Set, Magic: The Gathering, Rush Hour, Apples to Apples, Fluxx, Blokus, TransAmerica, 10 Days in Africa) and the less familiar (Traverse, Quiddler, Metro, Curses!, The Legend of Landlock, Tiki Topple).

While there were plenty of so-so games at the competition, the ones that won this year were solid choices. Without further ado, here are this year’s Mensa Select winners, in no particular order.

Image: Out of the Box Games

Word on the Street by Out of the Box Games
After playing Word on the Street, I knew it would be one of the winners. It’s a fun group game, but it also requires you to think. To play, make two teams. On each team’s turn, they are assigned a category and need to quickly come up with a word fitting that category that uses as many letters that are still on the board as possible. Those letters are then pulled closer to their side of the board, or off the edge. The first team that gets at least eight tiles of their side of the board wins.

Image: MindWare

Dizios by MindWare
I also knew Dizios would do well, since it’s great for families and has a simple concept. The idea is to match up the colors along the edges of the swirly colored tiles and gain as many points as possible by building on tiles that have as many dots as possible on them. The player with the most points at the end wins.

Image: Wiggles 3D

Yikerz! by Wiggles 3D
This game comes complete with its own sound effects! You place special magnets on triangular pieces of mouse-pad-like material, trying to stay out of the magnetic field of the other magnets. The object is to get rid of all of your magnets first, but beware! If you cause magnets to stick together, or if you push any off the edge, you have to pick those up. The noise the magnets make when they click together adds to the fun!

Image: Anomia Press

Anomia by Anomia Press
This seemingly simple card game will make you laugh and drive you crazy. You’ll also find yourself saying, “Uh..” a lot. It’s a fast paced game of pattern matching and thinking of words that fit categories. Fun for many ages and group sizes.

Image: Gamewright

Forbidden Island by Gamewright
This cooperative game was often compared to Pandemic at Mind Games. It wasn’t on my voting sheet and I regret not making time to play it. Here is the game’s description from Gamewright’s website:

Dare to discover Forbidden Island! Join a team of fearless adventurers on a do-or-die mission to capture four sacred treasures from the ruins of this perilous paradise. Your team will have to work together and make some pulse-pounding maneuvers, as the island will sink beneath every step! Race to collect the treasures and make a triumphant escape before you are swallowed into the watery abyss!

I was pleasantly surprised with Yikerz! and Anomia winning, though. Those were two games that I really enjoyed, but they seemed like underdogs. I’m pleased that other people enjoyed them as much as I did!

Regardless of which games win, all games played at Mind Games receive very helpful and often detailed feedback from the game-playing folk. This can help improve the game for future editions or give ideas for future games. Several of the games submitted contain wonderful pieces and materials, but the directions are lacking. Helpful suggestions from Mind Games participants can result in a new version of the rules and a very successful game.

Though it wasn’t a winner, the game I managed to snag at the end-of-event game giveaway was Zenith, a fun, family-friendly strategy game from MindWare. Some other games that I really enjoyed but that didn’t win include Simpatico, Fish Stix, AnimaLogic, Letter Roll, Q-bitz, 7 Ate 9 and Rory’s Story Cubes.

Note to Game Publishers: You can’t earn the Mensa Select Seal if you don’t submit games. Please consider submitting. Even if you don’t win, you still get invaluable feedback from people who know and love games, and hundreds of game playing folk will know about your game. Some will buy it when they get home. Some will take a copy home with them. It’s a great marketing opportunity!

People playing computer games to train their brains might as well be playing Super Mario, new research suggests.

In a six-week study, experts found people who played online games designed to improve their cognitive skills didn’t get any smarter.

Can any game stimulate your intellect or memory? (Credit: Nintendo)

Researchers recruited participants from viewers of the BBC’s science show Bang Goes the Theory. More than 8600 people aged 18 to 60 were asked to play online brain games designed by the researchers to improve their memory, reasoning and other skills for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week.

They were compared to more than 2700 people who didn’t play any brain games, but spent a similar amount of time surfing the internet and answering general knowledge questions. All participants were given a sort of IQ test before and after the experiment.

Researchers said the people who did the brain training didn’t do any better on the test after six weeks than people who had simply been on the internet. On some sections of the test, the people who surfed the net scored higher than those playing the games.

The study was paid for by the BBC and published online Tuesday by the journal Nature.

“If you’re [playing these games] because they’re fun, that’s absolutely fine,” said Adrian Owen, assistant director of the Cognition and Brain Sciences unit at Britain’s Medical Research Council, the study’s lead author. “But if you’re expecting [these games] to improve your IQ, our data suggests this isn’t the case,” he said during a press briefing on Tuesday.

One maker of brain games said the BBC study did not apply to its products. Steve Aldrich, CEO of Posit Science, said the company’s games, some of which were funded in part by the US National Institutes of Health, have been proven to boost brain power.

“Their conclusion would be like saying, ‘I cannot run a mile in under four minutes and therefore it is impossible to do so,” Aldrich said.

Posit Science has published research in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing their games improved memory in older people.

Computer games available online and marketed by companies like Nintendo that supposedly enhance memory, reasoning and other cognitive skills are played by millions of people worldwide, though few studies have examined if the games work.

“There is precious little evidence to suggest the skills used in these games transfer to the real world,” said Art Kramer, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Illinois. He was not linked to the study and has no ties to any companies that make brain training games.

Kramer had several reservations about the BBC study’s methodology and said some brain games had small effects in improving people’s cognitive skills. “Learning is very specific,” he said. “Unless the component you are trained in actually exists in the real world, any transfer will be pretty minimal.”

Instead of playing brain games, Kramer said people would be better off getting some exercise. He said physical activity can spark new connections between neurons and produce new brain cells. “Fitness changes the building blocks of the brain’s structure,” he said.

Still, Kramer said some brain training games worked better than others. He said some games made by Posit Science had shown modest benefits, including improved memory in older people.

Other experts said brain games might be useful, but only if they weren’t fun.

“If you set the level for these games to a very high level where you don’t get the answers very often and it really annoys you, then it may be useful,” said Philip Adey, an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at King’s College in London.

If people are enjoying the brain games, Adey said they probably aren’t being challenged and might as well be playing a regular video game.

He said people should consider learning a new language or sport if they really wanted to improve their brain power. “To stimulate the intellect, you need a real challenge,” Adey said, adding computer games were not an easy shortcut. “Getting smart is hard work.”

Let’s informally broaden the survey. Do you think any type of game can improve (or at least preserve) your brain power? Yes? No? Only for old folks? Discuss below.