Smart Games are for smart people. There's no way around it. Whether playing these games will actually make you smarter overall or just smarter at playing these games is up for debate. Now, I really like packages of desktop puzzles because I can take a quick break from my adventure-game-like job and sharpen my brain from the well-chewed stub it is. While Smart Games 3 offers a wide assortment of puzzles, many of them are Mensa-only mind benders.
Like many other desktop puzzle collections, you're presented with a menu of different games, 20 in this case. These games range from seemingly simple pattern-recognition games to math games to word games and even a trivia game. In one game, you try to seat passengers on an airplane by applying different rules to different groups of people. For example, Masons must sit in the same row as Lions, and Shriners must sit in even-numbered rows. The trick is getting all the passengers seated without violating any rules. Another game uses the familiar rock-paper-scissors theme. You eliminate items until every item is gone except one. Extra points are awarded if you can place a specific item in a specific square as your last move. Yet another game has you match up groups of butterflies based on wing pattern and shape, eliminated three, four, and five at a time. In this game, you get points for clearing the board as well as matching up patterns and wing shape.
You can probably tell that the games I liked the best had to do with recognizing and memorizing patterns. Some of my other colleagues preferred the math-oriented games (which I cannot do at all, much to my chagrin) and the word-oriented games (which I liked, but not as well as the pattern-recognition games). The only game that seems out of place in this collection is the trivia game (Who, What, Where, When), which rewards knowledge, not intelligence.
The first level of every puzzle is ridiculously simple. This makes for a nice, confidence-boosting start. Even I could get through the first level of Tumblin' Dice (a tricky math puzzle). However, the puzzles quickly increase in difficulty. It's rather like wading into the ocean up to your knees and having the sand suddenly drop away, leaving only the trackless depths below and the raging waters in front of you. I would have been more willing to play more games if the learning curve hadn't been quite so unforgiving.
While many of the 20 games had simple instructions, making play relatively intuitive, many had such complex instructions and counterintuitive keyboard commands, I simply gave up trying to make that stupid Lego-like brick snap into place and went back to seating the Shriners next to the Masons. No doubt these more-complicated games are a good brain tease, I just feel that desktop puzzles should be easy to learn and difficult to master. I don't want to spend half an hour just figuring out how to play. If I want that kind of torture, I'll fire up the Starcraft tutorial again.
One thing Smart Games 3 gives you is lots and lots of puzzles. Each of the 20 puzzles has at least 30 levels (one has 100), giving you more than 600 levels to play (yes, I used my calculator to figure that one out). In addition, if you get bored, you can download puzzle packs from the Smart Games web site that contain new levels for the Smart Games 3 games. In addition, you can join Smart Games leagues and compete in online contests.
So, on the one hand, I curse Smart Games 3 for telling me that my 33-year-old brain isn't as sharp as it was in its Stanford days. On the other hand, I just spent two hours getting rid of all the butterflies. If mind-bending addictive puzzles are your thing, you'll love Smart Games 3.
