The Mind (card game)

The Mind is a cooperative card game designed by Wolfgang Warsch and published in 2018 by Nurnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag, with an English language edition released by Pandasaurus Games. Two to four players work together to play a shared deck of cards numbered one to one hundred in ascending order, without speaking, gesturing, or otherwise coordinating who should play next. Each player holds a private hand of cards and must sense, purely through timing and instinct, when to lay a card face up onto a shared central pile. If a player plays a card lower than one already on the pile, the group loses one of its limited shared lives, and every remaining card lower than the misplayed one is discarded from every hand. Players can spend rare throwing star tokens to force everyone to unanimously discard their own lowest card, clearing a stuck round without penalty. The team advances through progressively longer levels, needing eight to twelve rounds cleared depending on player count, and wins once the final level is completed before its lives run out. The game drew notice for creating a distinctive feeling of collective intuition despite its simple rule set.