ThankSmart Family Wii is a collection of challenging mini-games in different categories such as Memory, Math, Logic, Visual, Language and Perception.  Generally speaking, most of the mini-games involve pointing the Wii-mote at the screen and clicking the trigger button to perform actions.

The game’s menu system is presented as if you are attending a zen-like retreat or office setting.  While sort of interesting, it does make doing what you want to do a bit confusing, especially for younger kids.

Each mini-game can be played on Easy, Medium or Hard difficulty.  Before each game, an on-screen tutorial is both written and narrated to make sure that players understand what they need to do.  This can be skipped if you don’t need it.

We found the easy setting to be just about right to be a nice challenge to older kids and younger tweens, while the Hard setting provided a nice challenge for teens and grown-ups.

ThinkSmart Family contains some really cool head-to-head competitive modes.  Race and Endurance modes consist of two teams going against each other in a series of tests.  In one mode, the goal is to finish fastest, but in the other mode the key is making the least amount of mistakes.  A third multiplayer mode, Tournament, is presented like a Quiz game, and players are rewarded for completing tasks successfully, but lose point for wrong answers.

One of the confusing things about this title is that it apparently is also sold as Think Logic Trainer.  In fact, the copy we received says ThinkSmart Family on the box, but when you open it up, the instruction manual and disc are called Think Logic Trainer, and the game actually shows up on the Wii and title screen as Thiink Logic Trainer.  We had to make sure we got the right game, and we indeed did, but this is definitely something confusing to be aware of.

ThinkSmart Family (or Think Logic Trainer) is a really neat way for families to compete with their brains.  The presentation and menu system takes a bit of getting used to, but once players have spent a bit of time playing the mini-games on their own, the many different multiplayer modes can lead to lots of enjoyable competitive and educational fun for tweens and up.