Dead of Winter designer’s Mental Blocks offers a new perspective on dexterity games

Dinosaur Island studio Pandasaurus wants to give you a fresh perspective on block-building dexterity games – literally.

Mental Blocks is a co-design from newcomer Micah Sawyer and veteran Dead of Winter co-creator Jonathan Gilmour.

A co-op game, Mental Blocks challenges players to race against the clock to build a specific shape using large foam blocks in a variety of basic colours and forms: squares, rectangles, triangles and so on.

What makes the puzzle extra tricky is that each player can only see the shape from a fixed perspective, meaning they’ll have to work together closely to ensure it matches exactly what’s on the card. 

If that wasn’t enough of a head-scratcher, the 60 puzzles in the box – half a ‘family’ level of difficulty, half from the tougher ‘challenge mode’ – can also present extra objectives, such as stopping players from talking or forbidding them from touching blocks of a certain colour.

The puzzles steadily increase in complexity, and can take another leap in difficulty with the option to introduce a secret betrayer to the group who works against the other players, similar to Dead of Winter’s traitor.

Mental Blocks will be released later this year.