The roll-and-write craze kinda fizzled, huh? Apart from one or two exceptions, the genre never developed much past the bijou phase. Maybe it’s for the best. Even though it hasn’t been all that long since we were playing dozens of the things, Nao Shimamura’s Mind Space carries itself with the air of a throwback. It’s crisp and elegant and even, dare I say it, thematic.

Selecting what shall occupy your mind palace.

Like a few other recent titles from Allplay, Mind Space is a reimplementation of an earlier title. In that one, which roughly translates to “Four-and-a-Half Tatami Room,” Shimamura tucks its players into shoes nearly everybody will recognize, whether from personal experience or countless television programs: that of a student struggling to finish their final year of school while juggling a job, hobbies, and their love life. Mind Space ambiguates that original setting, I suspect to its detriment. Now you’re an ordinary person balancing a half-dozen competing interests, regardless of the specific period of life. In making the setting less concrete it becomes, well, less concrete.

Oh well. As a representation of student or adult life, Mind Space does some surprising work. This is a game of trade-offs. One has time for play or work or love, with maybe a side interest and some friends thrown in, and a need for self-care that’s growing more pressing with each passing day, but rarely enough room in our schedules or heads to tackle everything. What would we do with an extra three hours each day? Take more naps, probably.

So you try to squeeze it all in. Here each pursuit is a polyomino, scattered by a roll of dice to conform to one of five colors. These each have their own criteria for scoring, all with a nice sense of identity. Purple shapes represent hobbies, but because hobbies are best shared with friends — how’s that for an assumption? — they only score when placed adjacent to orange shapes. Friends are their own reward, in the game’s thinking. There’s also self-care, represented by the most melancholy color, which will subtract a chunk of points at game’s end unless you’ve allowed some therapy into each broad segment of your life. There’s something nifty about this one: with the proper placement, you can get away with only two or three blue shapes. Doing your therapist’s homework really does pay off.

Maybe my favorite shape is pink. Standing for love, pink only awards points if it’s mirrored by another shape. But that shape must be another color, in part because you can never allow the same color of shape to touch its own type, lest, one assumes, the universe collapse in on itself. This is the game’s toughest objective to trigger. Fitting somebody into your life is always a little awkward. But you make the shapes work, and the reward is that both of them turn out points. It’s a heartwarming and even perceptive observation for a game that’s about playing Tetris with your gray matter.

Oh, and it also doesn’t land wrong that money is worth nothing at game’s end. Cash exists to spend. Either you swap your dollarbucks for extra shaded cells and the occasional wild shape, or it goes to waste. Take that, Mammon.

An ordered mind. Kinda.

The result is rather pleasant. Like many of its mechanical peers, this isn’t the most involved game out there. Shifting objectives give each game a bit of direction, but I wouldn’t call it replayability so much as a bit of extra scenery. This shouldn’t be taken as condemnation. I doubt I’ll play much more Mind Space. That seems to be a going concern for roll-and-writes; they’re too thin to keep my interest for long. But this is one that imparts some small feeling of the serenity it claims your character is seeking, along with a few crumbs of wisdom in unexpected places. For a small-box game in a set where Sail outsizes every other entry, Mind Space comes as a lovely surprise.

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