This week, we played both Hanabi and Mental Blocks in class. Both were interesting games that required everyone’s cooperation to complete and win. As someone with little to no board game experience, this was my first time playing cooperative games since I was a young child. These two were a great introduction to the topic and were more fun to play than I expected. For the purpose of this post, I will discuss my experiences with Mental Blocks.

Mental Blocks was challenging, although my group excelled at the game and finished every shape well before time was up. The hardest part of Mental Blocks was the restriction. On the first round, we were able to touch all shapes and colors and arrange them to show our team what the card looked like from individual perspectives. After the restriction, we had to get creative and ask someone on our team to touch a certain block for us, or even better, use two blocks that we could touch to pick up the third. In general, the “leader” of each round was the person who had the card that identified the shape of the structure. For our group, Nico got that card two out of three times and became our designated “leader.”

This game was a great introduction to cooperative games, and the fact that it required thought and cooperation made it that much better. I will have to refer this game to my boyfriend, Camron, as he enjoys mental games and would have really enjoyed playing this game in class.

-Alexandra Bartkoske