GAMES : Nothing’s Trivial in Mind Trap

Sick of getting trounced at Trivial Pursuit by people who can give you chapter and verse on Wally and the Beav but couldn’t put Col. Mustard in the conservatory with the lead pipe if the solution suddenly appeared in the sky in neon? There’s finally a game for you.

Here are a couple of questions in Mind Trap.

1) In Hawaii, if you drop a steel ball weighing 5 pounds from a height of 45 inches, will it fall more rapidly through water at 20 degrees Fahrenheit or water at 40 degrees Fahrenheit? Or will it make no difference?

Or:

2) A man and his son were rock climbing on a particularly dangerous cliff when they slipped and fell. The man was killed, but the son lived and was rushed to the hospital. An old surgeon looked at the young man and declared, “I can’t operate on this boy: He is my son.” How could this be?

Answers: 1) 40 degrees. At 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the water would be ice. 2) The old surgeon was the boy’s mother.

Stop pounding your forehead. This sort of thinking can be learned. In fact, it’s the only way to get good at Mind Trap, which might be called Anti-Trivial Pursuit.

The game is a boxed collection of cards on which are printed 500 separate puzzles, murder mysteries, conundrums and trick questions. The answers are neither obvious nor conventional, and there’s no way to study for them.

There are three basic types of questions: the type that appears easy and tempts you to pounce on a quick answer (and you’ll probably be wrong), the type that appears to be impossible to solve without more information (but that is actually obvious), and the type that appears difficult and actually is.

The game can be played by two individuals or two teams, and the rules are simple. One player from team A reads the question aloud to everyone and then silently reads the answer. The other players are then free to read the question at their leisure in search of the solution. Many of the questions have a small diamond printed in the upper left-hand corner of the card. This means the responding team may ask the reader probing questions. The reader may reply only with a “yes,” “no” or “irrelevant.” When a team answers correctly, a square is filled in on a pad that serves as a kind of racetrack for the two teams.

Mind Trap retails for about $30.