Mastermind!

by Katie

Problem -solving is in this game! Yep. That’s what the game is all about to me.

 There are two players in Mastermind, the codemaster and the codebreaker. The codemaster puts out a secret code of colored big pegs. Then the codemaster needs to make sure to keep their code secret and also put out little pegs for the codebreaker so they know some information. The codebreaker tries to figure out the code by guessing the pattern. Like if my mom puts out green-white-purple-orange and she is the codebreaker, I would look at my secret code and see how many pegs she has that are the right color in the right places, and how many are the right color in the wrong place and put out little pegs for that. You have to get them exactly right, in the right place.



Breaking the code!



When you are the codemaster you have to be really smart about your code because the other person might guess it in only one turn, so it’s good to be tricky. Also when you are the code breaker you need to use your thinking brain to put together the information you got from all of your other guesses and think-think-think hard to figure out the code.  

When I’m the codemaster I like to trace a line with my finger from each color in the guess to my secret code to make sure I’m putting out the exact right little white and red pegs. I don’t want give the codebreaker the wrong information!

The strategy is to look at everything all together. My mom calls that logic. I think that means to look back at your previous moves to make sure you don’t just guess the same wrong thing. I’m learning how to use logic to solve the mystery of the code!



Jack sneaks in and moves the pegs
around for extra challenge!



I like this game one hundred and fifty nine! That means I like it like almost infinity. It might even be one of my favorite games in the whole world of games. Totally. It’s different than my other favorite game, which is of course Settlers of Catan. I learned to play Mastermind yesterday and if you put all the times I’ve played it so far together I’ve played it about 16 times already!

I want to say thank you to the nice people at Pressman Toy for sending us all those games. I hope they are having a happy day like me, because I have new games to play. I hope all you blog readers have lots of happy games to play too.  Have fun playing games!