For Mensans, playing mind games is the point

April 27, 2002

Three days of playing games. Who'd have thought it was such hard work? Mensa Mindgames, in its 13th annual incarnation, convened in a suburban Minneapolis motel last weekend. From Friday afternoon to Sunday morning, each Mensa member plays 30 games among those submitted for judging, and they collectively choose the five most popular for the designation "Mensa Select."

For Mensa, a social organization open to people who score in the top 2 percent on any of a raft of IQ tests, the event is a combination of fund-raiser and publicity stunt. For the game manufacturers who enter their games, it's a marketing strategy.

For people who go to this event every year, it's a family reunion.

I hadn't been to Mindgames before, though I'd read about it in the Mensa Bulletin, but it sounded like fun and when the Twin Cities chapter was the host and I could combine it with the reunion of an actual family -- my son and daughter-in-law live in St. Paul -- that was irresistible. The event opened officially at 4 p.m. Friday, though people began playing games as soon as the room was ready, around noon. Several copies of each of the 50-plus games entered were stacked in alphabetical order on tables around the sides of the meeting room, with play tables in the center. Each of the 150 participants received a score sheet listing his or her assigned games.

Here's the drill: Sit at any table where there's room, go over the score sheets to find a game several of you have been assigned and haven't yet played, get a copy of the game, read the instructions, play it, or at least enough of it so you know how it works, score it. Repeat, until ballots have to be handed in at 9 a.m. Sunday.

I got to 23 of my 30.

Arguing about the instructions is not obligatory, but, given that we are talking here about Mensans, customary. We can't be the first organization about which it was said, "Organizing (insert name here) is like herding cats," but the description is singularly apposite. Spitting cats, too, as likely as not.

Complaints or suggestions on ambiguous or misleading instructions, or for that matter anything else about the game, go on green "comment" cards that are returned to the manufacturers after the event. These are supposed to be games already in commercial distribution, so it's distressing to see how many errors in spelling and grammar remain in the instructions. Apostrophes are sprinkled to taste. And why do people write "comprised of," when they would never write "included of," which is what it means?

What kind of games? Not computer or video games, because providing the hardware would be impractical. Not war games, in theory -- there were a couple -- because they take forever to set up and an eternity to play. Principally variations on card games; strategy games; board games; party games.

I'm not a frequent game player, but those who are talk about games as if they were wines, identifying subtle influences and not-so-subtle borrowings from existing games. It's hard to find anything genuinely new. What's the point of buying an expensive set of wooden tiles to play solitaire (the version called Klondike), when everybody already owns a deck of cards? For that matter, why buy a deck of cards specialized for rummy when you can play it perfectly well with a generic deck?

Delight in something one hasn't seen before perhaps accounts for the appeal of a game called Muggins, one of the five winners and my top choice. You roll three dice and can play any number (from 1 to 36) you can make from them using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division -- which is more intriguing than it sounds. Another winner that I played and liked was Legend of Landlock, a topological strategy game tricked out in a whimsical fantasy setting with (smiling) gnomes. When it was announced, the friend I was sitting with said, "Oh, I hated that." No accounting for tastes.

After the winners are announced, the games are handed out as door prizes. I chose two in the party-game genre. Three other Coloradans who were at Mindgames also picked party games, thinking that we could use them for one of our local chapter's monthly meetings, not only because it would be fun but to generate support in our chapter for hosting Mindgames sometime in the future.

It would be a family-and-friends reunion.