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Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders announced for DS

Leading boardgame designer gets to star in his own game

Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders announced for DS

This generation of video games are doing a sterling job of turning very intelligent but completely unknown people (Dr Kawashima and Professor Kageyama spring to mind) into minor celebrities. It seems you can't get a brain training style of game taken seriously any more unless you tack some genius's name in front of the title.

Eidos has now decided to get in on the trend by announcing the imminent release of Dr Reiner Knizia's Brainbenders for DS. Dr Knizia is a German-born boardgame designer with over 200 board games to his name that include the million-selling Lord of the Rings, the award-winning Lost Cities and strategy affair Tower of Babel. He's also fairly intelligent, having given up a job as a quantitative analyst to make boardgames. We know which we'd rather do.

Anyway, Knizia has designed a range of games for this Eidos release and as such it contains a whole range of puzzles, conundrums and family-friendly challenges promising to "make you laugh and cry".

In an interesting twist, puzzles take place across the globe as you can see from the screenshots above, which show the doctor in a range of fetching outfits ranging from lab coat to safari suit. Games include organising dancers at the Rio Carnival, memorising melodies at the Sydney Opera House, counting marine life off the coast of Cape Town and discovering the secrets of the Aztec ruins.

You can also send games to your friends over wi-fi and challenge them to beat your top scores.

Despite spending a great deal of our lives locked in digital entertainment, we've got something of a soft spot for a good boardgame and we're expecting the multi-award-winning Dr Knizia should be able to think up some more than decent, and hopefully pretty original, types of games. The release date is yet to be confirmed.

Kath Brice
Kath Brice
Kath gave up a job working with animals five years ago to join the world of video game journalism, which now sees her running our DS section. With so many male work colleagues, many have asked if she notices any difference.