Brain Cheeser

Players: 1
Ages: 5 and up
Purchase: Buy on Amazon (affiliate link)
Math Ideas: spatial reasoning, logical deduction
Questions to Ask: 
   Can you use the pieces fill in the board, ignoring the mice for now?
   Can you fill in the board so that all six mice have a hole?
 

This week's game is a recommendation from one of my colleagues at UAB. He's a real-deal mathematician, so when he sent me the link and told me that "some of the puzzles are quite challenging" I got a little scared.

But as it turns out, this puzzle game is extremely approachable! My almost-5-year-old daughter can solve some of the first puzzles, while my son is stuck at around the midpoint of the puzzles. Personally, I'm about 3/4 of the way through, and man... my coworker wasn't kidding.

So no matter how old your kids are, they'll definitely find puzzles in this game that are right in the sweet spot of challenging, but not impossible, to solve. And the game is magnetic, which makes it a perfect diversion for any holiday-related car or plane rides.

The game is called Brain Cheeser.

How to Play

Brain Cheeser is a one-person puzzle game by the aptly-names SmartGames. 

The game comes with eight puzzle pieces that are styled like Swiss cheese, each of which are missing semicircular pieces. The goal of the game is to place these puzzle pieces on the board so that all the semicircles form full circles. The game also provides some circular mice pieces to help guide you toward a solution.

Just like on a real piece of Swiss cheese, you can have half-circles along the outside of the cheese, but not on the interior of the cheese. There is always exactly one solution to each of the 48 puzzles.

The first set of puzzles gives you a diagram with several puzzle pieces already placed, so you only need to place a few pieces to complete the puzzle. These first few problems were very approachable for my daughter.

As the game progresses, those puzzle pieces start to disappear, and the only thing left is a diagram of some of the circular mouse tokens. These tokens show you where your cheese must have a hole, but it's up to you to figure out which puzzle pieces to use to make that hole.

That's the game! Like most well-designed puzzle games, the initial puzzles help you familiarize yourself with the pieces, even if the puzzles themselves aren't too challenging. For that reason, I recommend that everyone starts with puzzle 1 and progresses through the entire set of 48 puzzles.

Where's the Math?

Like most puzzles and puzzle-based games, Brain Cheeser is all about spatial reasoning and logical deduction! 

Each puzzle piece is distinct, which means they can only fit on certain parts of the board. Every piece you place, therefore, restricts other pieces. You may place four or five pieces, only to realize that the last three simply can't fit anywhere on the board.

Your child will be mentally rotating each of the pieces, thinking of the different ways they can combine to form circles, and getting creative with their configurations. And, as with most puzzle games, the more they play the more sophisticated their ideas will become!

Questions to Ask

Brain Cheeser is a solitaire game, so your kids will likely amuse themselves with the game by themselves. It's a game I like to leave out at the breakfast table so my kids have something mathematical to mess around with while eating.

But there are definitely questions you can ask and ideas you can explore together!

First, I'd ask your child "Can you place all the pieces on the board together, following the rules of the game?"

This is not totally simple, since you can't have any half-circles in the interior of the cheese. But it gets your kids familiar with all the pieces and how they interact.

Once they've done so and you've confirmed that they followed the rules, you can ask them to do it again. This time, though, ask them to place the mice tokens inside the holes and then remove all the cheese pieces. That way, you can try to solve a puzzle that they invented!

Kids don't often get an opportunity to build a puzzle, but this game gives them that chance. And it might become addictive! Maybe they'll start looking for ways to create their own puzzles with other games!

But even if they don't, they'll still have a lot of fun playing Brain Cheeser.

Click here to buy Brain Cheeser on Amazon (affiliate link)