We played a few different 5 in a row games this week at our Board Games Club for Adults. We have played Pente, Pentago, Cavendish and Cambio before, so brought them back: some people played them for the first time; others played them as a recap and enjoyed reflecting on the similarities and differences between the games.

We played Swish (ThinkFun, 2011), a game of visual perception, for the first time with the adults. There are 60 transparent cards; each card has some combination of balls and hoops on it, in different positions, with these shapes being in four colours. A Swish is two or more cards that can be laid on top of one another in a way that every ball fits in a hoop of the same colour. Flipping and rotating are allowed. To start the game, 16 cards are laid out in a 4×4 grid. Players simultaneously try to create a Swish, keeping the cards used, with new cards laid to fill in the gaps in the grid. The player with the most cards when the deck runs out is the winner. Some people enjoyed this game more than others did. We reflected on how different games use different parts of the brain, and appeal to some people more than others. Anna said she wanted to attached probes to people’s brains to see the different parts firing up. Strangely no-one volunteered for this assignment.