MASTER MIND VARIATIONS
Over the years, this game has undergone through a large number of incarnations produced by varied production houses – some clichéd while the others entirely new in their approach.
Take for instance the Walt Disney Mastermind released in the year 1978. The Disney characters used in the game instead of the colored pegs turned out to be a huge hit among children.
Again, the Grand Mastermind which came out in the year 1974 was aimed at a more mature set of players as the six colors were replaced by their peculiarly shaped counterparts which differed in color as well.
Even now, production houses such as Invicta, Parker Brothers, Pressman, Hasbro are churning out newer and engrossing versions of the game, with the latest being the New Mastermind, having provisions for almost 5 people to play at a time
The USP of this game is that you will never get tired of it. The reason behind this is you can easily add your very own ingenious touch to it. One can very easily change the difficulty settings of the game; take for instance, you can make things difficult by treating empty as an additional ‘color’ or, even decrease the difficulty by removing the concept of a white peg i.e. the player will have to guess the colors only and not the position of each respective ball.
The game could be further simplified by removing the possibility of duplicate colored balls as a viable option
You can even intensify the game by reducing the number of steps in which the Codebreaker has to tell the pattern; however, keep in mind that for this, the steps number of steps has to be an even multiple.
So, experiment tweaking the rules according the age-group of the players who would be participating in this battle of wits
With no age limits being set for playing this game, this game has quickly caught up with other board games of the same genre, such as Battleship and Chess. And in comparison to those games, this is far more easier to play as there are practically no rules to keep in mind while cracking the code.
Again, the small amount of time required for one round to complete helps in just stimulating the brain and not overtax it, thus making the game all the more interesting. This game also allows you to innovate with a never ending range of changes that you can make to the game to keep it new each time you play it.
Many schools have adopted this game in order to train their students’ logic sense and you don’t need to doubt for this is indeed showing results and miraculous as well.
This is what Mary Pentan of Illinois, who recently won her intra-school chess competition, had to say about MASTERMIND. ”My daily routine consisted of one hour of chess practice with my tutor and the remaining free time he advised me to spend playing MASTERMIND with my 8 year old brother who does not know how to play chess for he said that instead of practicing alone, it will be better training with an opponent .”
This is an ideal game for developing as well as nurturing your mental agility and intellect. This game is definitely a must buy for who knows the next Gary Kasparov or Tatiana Kosintseva could be your son or daughter or even you………
