Mind Map

• Designers: Gary Kim, Hope S. Hwang, Yohan Goh
• Publisher: Sorry We Are French / Funny Fox
• Players: 4-14
• Age: 10+
• Time: 20 minutes
• Played with copy provided by distributor, Hachette USA

Make your opponents guess your secret word by placing your coordinate token in the game zone according to two criteria. Sometimes you’ll push your logic limit, but don’t forget to take the reference word into account! Will you be able to grasp your opponents’ logic and make them understand yours?

1. Place your token based on how closely your Secret word relates to the Criteria on each Axes.
2. Take the Reference word and other player’s words into account
3. Guess your opponents’ words to earn the most points!

To set up the game, place the Axis tiles on the table.  Give each player all the bits of a color (player card, coordinate marker, vote tokens). Shuffle the Criteria cards into a deck, do the same with the Word cards.  Deal out a number of Word cards equal to the number of players, putting each one next to a numbered spot on the vertical axis.  Draw one Criteria card for each axis, putting the card face up on it.  A Word card is placed face up at the intersection of the two Criteria.  Finally, shuffle the number cards (going from 1 to the number of players) and give each player a number – this tells the player which Word card is their secret word for the round.

Players now consider the two criteria on the axes as well as the Reference word, and then they place their coordinate token somewhere in the area bounded by the two Axis boards. The axes are felt to be infinite, so you can place your marker above the end of the vertical axis and to the right of the horizontal axis.  Players can move their markers as they see where other players place their token – you might try to guess which word goes with the other markers and then play yours accordingly….  Once all players are satisfied with the location of their token, the placement ends and the game moves to the voting phase.

Now players take their tokens and place their numbered vote tokens face down on all the coordinate tokens except their own, trying to match the number of the token to the number of the secret word for that token. All votes are face down.

Once all the votes are in, players take turns revealing their number card and the votes on their token.  You score 1 point per player who guessed your word, and one point for each correct guess that you made.  The game ends after three  rounds.  The player with the most points wins.  There is no tiebreaker.

My thoughts on the game

Mind Map is a neat idea for a party game where you use some deduction and some knowledge of your fellow players to try to figure out who has which word.  Each game will be different due to the combination of the word cards and the category cards that come up for each round.  

I’d definitely recommend this with as high as a player count as you can manage…  When we played with just four players, it seemed pretty easy to figure out in most rounds which words went with which coordinate marker.  Sure, there were a couple of times that two closely placed markers could be a toss up, but if the four coordinates were far apart, it was usually pretty easy for a perfect round to be had.  We ended up making a house rule where we threw in one extra word that was assigned to no one, and this helped a little bit.  FWIW, adding two extra words broke the game completely and I would not recommend that.

I like the way that the placement round allows players to see where other people put their markers and then everyone can adjust their locations based on where other people have placed their marker – though this relies upon your ability to infer what word someone else has based on their placement location!

As with a lot of party games like this, your overall success is possibly determined more by the uniqueness of your word amongst the bunch.  If you’re always placing your marker in a position far away from the others, it’s more likely that everyone guesses your word correctly, and you’ll score a bunch of points for that.  Of course, in a game like this, winning and losing is usually not as important, as the fun here is in the laughs generated when the coordinate markers and the guess tokens don’t match up and you listen to the funny stories of why players thought it was this word or that!

For a casual game, or a filler for those not looking for anything serious, this is a nice title.  It also can accommodate larger groups with its team format, so that is a nice feature as well.

Until your next appointment

The Gaming Doctor