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Albert Einstein was one brainy bod! No doubt about that. Theoretical physics and quantum mechanics aren’t generally regular topics of conversation, but the impact of his work is all around us. And, relativity speaking, his contributions to science and technology are still as relevant today as they were back in the 1950s. As it is the anniversary of Albie’s birthday on 14 March (aka National Genius Day), but genius comes in all sorts of guises, here are 5 inspiring games for you to test your intellectual mettle!
Lacrimosa - Favouritefoe
I know, I know. It’s not science based but there’s no denying that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was considered a musical genius! As such, I’m bringing the arts into National Genius Day with Lacrimosa by KOSMOS games.
Lacrimosa is also pretty ingenious for the way it stuffs so many mechanics into one game, not to mention being able to time travel and play both in the past and the present (see? I did get sciencey-stuff in there!).
Essentially, this is gorgeously packaged euro-game goodness. By way of a little background, Mozart was composing the Lacrimosa movement of his Opus Requiem on his death bed. His widow wishes to raise money to find composers who can complete his masterpiece and write about them in her memoires in a final tribute of devotion to her beloved husband.
In the game, we each play Patrons willing to fund her passion project and be remembered in her memoirs for our contributions! Taking place over over 5 Eras, each player has 4 turns per Era to basically get as much good stuff planned and played as possible for VPs! Each turn you'll be taking one action and reserving one bonus. Hand Management, engine building, drafting, end game bonuses...so much squeezed in!
In Lacrimosa, what you do is sort of down to you. Everybody can effectively take a different route to victory by focusing on specific elements of the game. And there are lots of ways to gain VPs both in-game and at end, but they all take planning ahead! Costanze herself offers bonuses, but to mould your strategy around her round bonuses would be missing out on lots of other great stuff. There’s also a genius-level hand management/action selection mechanic where you use multi-use cards for immediate actions or end round bonuses, not to mention jubby upgrades. I personally love the double layer player boards that look like song books. Oh and the area control aspect of the requiem section is one sweet note indeed!
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective - Andy Broomhead
How better to mark National Genius Day than pitting your wits against the world’s foremost mastermind detective. Let’s see how smart you really are…
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective sees you taking on a variety of cases, each contained within their own individual case booklet. To help you get started, you’ll have a summary of the crime. And that’s it. The only other tools are your disposal are a map of London, a directory of individuals and businesses, and a newspaper from the day.
Your role is one of the Baker Street Irregulars, using your eyes, ears and wits to try and solve the case before the great detective himself. It plays similarly to a choose-your-own-adventure, with each case booklet having information about particular addresses across London, as you choose where to visit, and when. You make your own notes and narrow down the options as your pile of evidence grows.
You can choose to solve the case at any moment, answering a series of questions at the back of the booklet to calculate your score. However, you’ll lose points for each lead or location you follow beyond those that Sherlock visits, putting the emphasis on your powers of deduction to solve the case as efficiently as possible.
It’s great fun, and remarkably immersive for something that relies so much on a lot of cleverly written text and very little else. Beating Sherlock is hard, but not impossible, though you can also just play for the fun of it, trying to get the best score you can and acknowledging there is only one true genius at play. If that’s not all, you can pick up extra case files as expansions, giving you more opportunities to try and one-up the great man himself!
Turing Machine - Hannah Blacknell
There is one thing that most of us did everyday during lockdown. No, not staring longingly out the window wondering how best to use our one walk a day. That thing was Wordle. The logic word game took the world by storm. Now what if I told you, you could have a board game with the same thrill of working it out, the same deduction but with no words, and completely analog? You in? Turing Machine has it. It has innovation in spades in my opinion.
Turing Machine is a board game that is based around a punch card computer. The aim of the game is to find the three digit code by asking a number of different questions of the punch card computer and using the answers and your powers of deduction to solve the puzzle before your fellow players. The question cards are determined by the setup at the start for that particular puzzle. There are literally millions, we need not worry about running out! These might be statements like the blue number is even. Then you place the verifier card over your proposed code and it will either come up with a true or false symbol. You use three verifiers with your code in each round before creating a new proposal for the following round.
This game is mind blowing - the perfect amount for National Genius Day. That same way you marvel at Dobble when you actually think about how crazy it is that every card has a matching pair of symbols with every other card. That but infinitely bigger is how astounded I am by this game. Also did I mention it is heaps of fun to play too!?
Who’s She - Dan Street-Phillips
In 2018 a tiny publisher called Playeress managed to grab the attention of over 6500 backers on Kickstarter for their debut game, Who’s She?. The initial premise was inspired by the 1979 mammoth Guess Who?
Originally, Guess Who? was based on identifying characters by deduction focused on appearance. New editions takes that ingeniously simple idea and apply it to household objects, monsters, and more! But Guess Who? also pushed the founder of Playeress, Zuzia Kozerska-Girard, to think about how else you might identify people.
What if you identified people by their achievements instead of whether they wore glasses or not? And more importantly what if everyone on the board was an incredible woman from history? From roots in Guess Who?, Who’s She? was born And in that game all the tiles show a multitude of great women from all over the world. Next to them are a series of symbols showing their accomplishments. So, in the familiar Guess Who? way, ask; ‘did she win a Nobel prize?”, or “was she an activist?”.
Although there are political and environmental activists, there are also political leaders and most relevant here, scientists and inventors who changed the world with their work. You may have heard about Marie Curie and her discovery of radium, but you may not have heard about Alice Ball who was the first woman and first African-American to graduate from the a university of Hawaii with a master’s degree.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Alice Ball created the first effective treatment for Leprosy before a tragically early death. This game is not only fascinating, offering a wide mix of incredible women to learn about but it still manages to keep that exciting energy and initial genius idea we all remember from flipping those tiles in Guess Who? back when we were children.
Ingenious - Rachael Duchovny
Forget joining Mensa! Don’t bother with an IQ test! Forget all about Trivia! This National Genius Day show your friends that you truly are the smartest of the bunch with this abstract strategy game for 2 to 4 players.
Ingenious is a game about placing tiles to maximise points where, well, ingenious people test their wits by not scoring the highest points but ensuring they don’t score the lowest points overall. This game is accessible too! It has shapes as well as colours so you can still enjoy a game even if you’re colour blind.
Each turn you place one tile with at least 1 matching colour (/shape) to score points, moving pegs along your board to keep track. The game ends when you can no longer place a tile on the board. When this happens each player looks at their lowest scoring colour and that is their score for the game. To win, have the highest lowest score… genius right? A tongue twister if nothing else.
This game is a fantastic blend of tile placement strategy and hindering your opponent’s moves by placing blocking tiles and even locking in single tiles so they can’t be used, thus ending the game a little bit quicker. If you want to test which of your friends truly is the genius among you on National Genius Day, I dare you to challenge them to this game, if you’re brave enough!