Engineering a reliable platform or planning the correct business strategy takes a considerable amount of mental effort. As exciting and interesting as these challenges are, it is easy to get lost in the minutia and get stressed out about minor details, where the details are usually rare but possible edge-case code scenarios, or unlikely but possible market “what ifs”. Here in the offices of Eluciv Knowledge we are always on the lookout for methods that would allow us to take a short mental break, take a step back and refocus. Most of us are avid video gamers and chess enthusiasts, but video games and chess have certain negative qualities that make them less than ideal choices in a startup environment. Video games have the have the potential to turn into a giant black hole of time, easily eating up two hours if you’ve just stumbled on an interesting “Witcher” or “Oblivion” quest. Chess seems to exercise the same faculty of the brain that coding and business planning exercise - the one that is most heavily involved in multi-step strategic processes. So, if you are stuck on a strategic question, chess is quite possibly the worst thing to turn to. Also, we are not really into speed-chess, so a game can turn into a 30 minute affair - not as long as an RPG quest, but still.

The ideal activity has to have the following qualities:
• It must be granular enough that an individual session lasts about ten minutes.
• Must not require long-term strategic planning.
• Individual sessions must be different enough that 2-3 sessions in a row are still meaningful and exciting, if a longer break is needed

Currently, the “SET” game satisfies those requirements. SET exercises a very different mental faculty that is heavily tied into visual pattern recognition. Intuitively, I am inclined to say that it is not a faculty that comes into play often during engineering efforts, at least for me; thus it is a very welcome respite. I have been playing it on and off for the last 4 years; Orian and I have introduced the rest of the team to it, and so far the response has been positive: even Constantine, who at first dismissed it as “bull@#$%”, admitted the next day that it was quite fun.

A prima facie criticism applied to SET is that it seems to be very much a game that appeals to a person’s innate talent - either you are predisposed to finding visual patterns very quickly, or you are not, and that’s the end of it; or you started playing it very young and the impressionable brain has shaped itself in accordance. Thanks to my personal experience, I am inclined to disagree. I only learned and started playing the game after college, at 22. Prior to that, I always considered myself as ineligible for any kind of visual pattern recognition activity. I have come a long way since then, and consider myself to be a somewhat competitive SET player, though only in the casual setting.