Gather Exclusive: Making Memories Together -- A Game for a Failing Mind

When he was a boy growing up in Boston back in the 1950s, Gene Cohen played word games and cribbage with his father, Ben.  In the months before his dad died in 1997, a victim of Alzheimer's disease, they played a different game – one that Gene himself developed. He played it again this year with his mother, Lillian, who had advanced dementia, before her death in April. It is the first ever patented board game designed for Alzheimer's patients, and it makes it possible for families to communicate with their mentally decimated loved ones when little or no other means exist.

Gene is a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist who is one of the world's leading experts on the aging brain.  He is also an avid games-maker specializing in those that allow different generations to play on even terms.  No surprise, most of his ingenious games are variations on either word games or cribbage.

Unlike his other inventions, the Alzheimer's game does nothing to exercise and strengthen the brain. Rather, it enables patients who may barely recognize friends or family members to join them in play.  "My mother would ask the same question 10 times in as many minutes," Gene told me, "but there was no repetition during the game. It was quality time for her and for us." As patients' mental capacities fade, visitors tend to get more and more uncomfortable, and they find reasons not to visit. The game keeps them coming.  It is called "Making Memories Together" and is expected to go on sale by December 2007.

The game is built around four squares that are repeated all around the board, representing different aspects of the patients' lives: people, animals, special occasions, and favorite objects. The marker is a beanbag, which moves around the board with the throw of an oversized die or the picking of a card.

When the beanbag lands on one of the four squares, the patient is shown a relevant photograph provided by family members. For example, with his parents, Gene used photographs of his father during his years of service aboard the USS Indianapolis in the 1930s. One of his mother's favorites was a photo of her holding her first great-granddaughter, Ruby, Gene's first granddaughter. Each photograph bears a written description of its contents, which is read aloud. The description makes it possible for non-family visitors to play.

Some photos are likely to evoke a greater response than others.  In that case, Gene says, "I encourage families to stack the deck."

Another of his creations is a board game called W-W III. The pieces are called soldiers, the action takes place on a battlefield, and the first player to emerge victorious in five battles wins the war.  But all those militaristic trappings are a Gene Cohen tease. "W-W" actually stands for Word-War, not World-War. No blood is spilled, no pieces are knocked off the board, and the outcome depends on your vocabulary, not your weaponry.  "All future wars," he preaches, "should be fought this way -- only with words."

In the era of the appallingly violent video games, Gene's approach seems almost quaint, a welcome reminder of the earliest American board games. Mansion of Happiness, for instance, which first appeared in 1843, was a lesson in morality, played with dice: As you moved along a spiral track, you progressed toward Happiness by landing on spaces called Temperance and Honesty and were set back when you landed on Poverty or Perjury.

In those days, the whole family took part in the game – children, parents, and grandparents.  Gene Cohen has designed his games to encourage that same kind of sharing.  Pieces are shaped, colored, and sized to make them more easily recognized by children and the visually impaired. The games also suggest "equalizers" that allow players of different ages and skill levels to compete to the best of their abilities, greatly increasing their enjoyment.  In W-W III, which is a combination of chess and scrabble, less skilled players may be allowed to use a dictionary or create words with fewer letters or win with a lower score.

One of Gene's major goals with his games is to inspire us all to exercise our brains, and that goes for the young among us as well as the old.  "The brain is like a muscle that grows stronger when it's used and challenged," he says. Word and number games do that, but they intimidate many people, so he came up with a game based on a word-and-number device we're all comfortable with: the telephone.  Then he added tic tac toe.  The game that emerged is called, naturally enough, Tic Tac Phone.

Like W-W III, this is a complex operation. It partakes of scrabble in that points are gained by forming words; it smacks of games like RummyCube because points are scored by word runs of the same color; it also awards points for a run of three or four in Tic Tac Toe fashion.

Gene makes no apology for the complexity.  "Too many people want to learn a game in a couple of minutes," he says. "If you can do that, your interest in the game won't last too much longer."  These are board games that are all about skill, not luck.  Like chess, they take considerable study, and they reward you with continuing stimulation and challenge.

The third of Gene's games now on the market is called The Essential Cribbage Board, "essential" because it harkens back to the ancient design concept of 30-hole streets, but with four of them to accommodate the modern game's 121 holes.  The board is far larger than most with more space between holes, and it is the first to provide players with pegs of different shapes and colors. Both of those features serve to make it much easier for players of all ages to follow the action.

"Cribbage has always been seen as a great way for parents and grandparents to teach number skills to children," Gene says, "and a way for different generations to be together." That was his father's gift to him as a boy, and his new version of cribbage is his contribution to maintaining that much-treasured tradition.

Essential Cribbage, W-W III, and Tic Tac Phone are available through Gene's company, Genco, at (301) 946-6446.

Bob Stock is a veteran of The New York Times.

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