Are you going up or are you going down? Keep your head up in Mind Up!
Shuffle the hefty stack of colored cards and place as many cards as players in the center of the table. The cards are placed side by side in ascending values. Players also all get a hand of cards to “bid” with. Players also place score cards in front of them.
The game consists of several rounds and each round consists of a number of bids. Once players have only 1 card left in their hand after a bidding, the round is over. Every bidding, each player simultaneously plays a card from their hand. The lowest card played gets the lowest card in the middle of the table and so on.
The cards obtained are placed face up in front of the players near the score cards. This is where the interesting part of the game begins. Namely, colors are placed together in “piles”. If you obtain a card in a color you did not already have, you place it with your first free score card to form a new pile. The score cards indicate how many points you score per card with this pile.
The cards that have been played remain on the table and players now bid on these cards. If players have only a single card left in hand, they play it on the relevant score pile. At the end of each round, players score points and the player with the most points wins. For a more challenging game, you can add special score cards.
Mind Up is a simple, elegant and ingenious card game. Although it is sometimes unpredictable what other players will do, the combination of bluffing, luck, risk assessment and tactics makes for a fast paced card game.
