The Mind: Soulmates Review
The Mind - Soulmates takes the game everyone knows for silent ascending order and hides the pile. Cards go down face down, and one player — the sighted person — is allowed to look at cards in advance and feed the table clues.
That single asymmetry is the whole product. Buy it if the original is already on your shelf and your group has stopped losing at level eight. Do not buy it first: it assumes you have internalised the base game’s tension, and without that it is merely confusing.
What changed
The original, from 2018, is famously spare. Everyone holds cards from a shared range, you build one ascending pile face up in the middle, and you may not communicate at all — no counting, no gestures, no turn order. Each level deals one more card per player: one at level one, two at level two, on through twelve.
Soulmates keeps the twelve levels and the silence, then changes two things.
The pile is face down. You no longer watch the ascending sequence form. The running feedback that tells you whether the group is on track disappears, and that feedback is exactly what the original leans on to build tension. You find out how it went when the level resolves.
Someone can see. One player takes the sighted role, may look at cards in advance, and gives the team clues. This is the first legitimate information channel the series has allowed, and it changes the social shape of the game. The original is four people guessing in parallel. Soulmates is one person trying to steer without saying the thing they are not allowed to say.
Why the combination works
Taken separately, either change would weaken the game. Hiding the pile alone removes feedback and adds frustration. Adding a player who can see would trivialise it.
Together they trade one kind of information for another. You lose the objective signal of a visible pile and gain a subjective, deliberately lossy one in the sighted player’s clues. The question moves from “is my card next?” to “what did they mean by that?” — a different game on the same twelve-level skeleton.
Playing the sighted seat
The role is harder than it sounds, and it is where the game is won or lost.
Knowing what is coming does not tell you how to say it. You are trying to convey timing to people who cannot see the pile, using clues that must stay inside whatever the group has agreed counts as legal. Say too little and the team plays blind anyway; say too much and you have solved the puzzle for them and drained the tension the whole line is built on.
There is also a trap in over-steering. Because the pile is face down, a clue that turns out to be misread does not surface until the level resolves, so the sighted player often does not learn they were unclear until the damage is done. Groups tend to calibrate over several plays rather than within one.
The practical advice is to fix what your clues mean before you start, not during. A pair who agree in advance on what a pause or an emphasis signals will get further than one improvising a private language mid-level.
Where it sits in the line
Two variations sit alongside the original, and they pull in different directions.
Extreme, from 2019, keeps the original rules and doubles the problem: two simultaneous stacks, one ascending and one descending, with some levels played blind. That is the harder game.
Soulmates, from March 2023, is the more interesting one rather than the more difficult one. It changes what you are doing rather than how much of it you must do.
If your group wants a stiffer test of the same skill, Extreme is the buy. If the base game has gone stale and you want the silence to feel unfamiliar again, this is.
Practical notes
Two to four players, ages 8 and up. The 8+ rating is honest for the mechanics, since a child can play ascending order, but the sighted seat rewards reading people — in a mixed-age group, give it to whoever enjoys that pressure rather than rotating it blindly.
It sits a few euros above the original at retail, which is negligible next to the real risk, which is buying it first and bouncing off it.
What works and what does not
Works well:
- The face-down pile removes the feedback the original depends on, and the game is better for it.
- The sighted player is the series’ first genuine information channel, and it is deliberately imperfect.
- Twelve levels and 2-4 players keep it as portable and quick to teach as the original.
Does not:
- A poor entry point; the design assumes familiarity with the base game.
- The sighted role concentrates pressure on one seat, which not every group enjoys.
- Like the whole line, it lives or dies on the group. A table that will not take it seriously gets nothing from it.
Verdict
8/10. Soulmates is the most interesting thing NSV has done with The Mind, because it changes the nature of the puzzle instead of raising its difficulty. The face-down pile and the sighted player are a genuinely clever pairing.
It loses a point for being strictly a second purchase. As a variation it is excellent; as a standalone it does not stand.
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