The Mind is a co-operative card game where players are working together to get a handful of cards played in ascending order without stating what each player has. There are life points which are lost when a card is played out of sequence, and there are stars that can be used to overcome some difficult situations where players don't feel confident about when to play. With everything being played without talking, sometimes there are other queues that people might pay attention to, such as how quickly another player is going for a card in their hand, or whether a player is even bothering to look at what is being played for a while. Of course, this can backfire if someone gets sidetracked by every squirrel that runs across the yard, but that's probably why the game rules state that there are calls for "focus".
On July 20th at Tim's house, the two of us played The Mind a few times. We had played it long ago, so we knew the basics of what to expect, but forgot some of the specifics. After we got familiar with the game again, at one point Tim was waiting for me to play a card, since he had some numbers that were really high, but I also had some high numbers, so we both waited a bit. Finally it got to a point where I played a card, and he was just watching his daughter playing in the chair next to us. Thinking that was part of his indication that he still had even higher cards, I played another, and after more time, another card. Then he finally looked down at the deck and realized that he had lost focus on this game and actually had other cards to play in between what I had played. We had a good laugh, but based on previous plays, it wasn't that unusual for someone to be purposely idle in this mostly silent game.
