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Brain Voyage is an enjoyable addition to the genre of brain-teaser type games for the Nintendo DS. Your host and tour guide is Dr. Reiner Knizia, a German game designer with a doctorate in mathematics. According to the liner notes, he’d already designed more than 400 other games and puzzles, in addition to the puzzles in Brain Voyage. Just as a side note, his digital image as your tour guide and game host in Brain Voyage is actually a reasonable likeness.

I really like how Brain Voyage manages save slots. You can have three different player profiles. Each player profile, I quickly learned, has a total of 20 slots for saving different games. After you’ve selected (or created) your profile, there are four different modes of play: World Tour, Random Play, Puzzle Bank and DS Download Play. Since World Tour is the meat of the game, I’m going to begin there.

In World Tour mode, you have the option to travel to up to 16 different cities around the world. Each city features a different puzzle challenge. You’ll begin with 12 potential locations and then unlock the additional cities through play. As you successfully solve puzzles, you’ll earn coins. This is important since you need coins to unlock harder levels of your current puzzles or unlock additional cities to get new puzzles. On the world map, the green cities are places immediately available or that you have already unlocked — you’ll start with four. Yellow cities are the ones you can afford but haven’t been to yet. Red cities are out of your budget. The special cities that you can unlock through play won’t appear on the map until you meet their conditions.

Each of the puzzles has a potential of four levels of difficulty. Spend enough time playing (and winning), and you’ll unlock a fifth bonus level for each puzzle. I was happy to see that once you’ve unlocked the bonus level of difficulty, you’ve unlocked it for everything. You don’t have to earn it individually for each puzzle.

For each level of each puzzle, you can earn a bronze, silver or gold medal, depending on your performance, of course. Each medal level earns you a number of gold coins. Even if you’re particularly bad at one of the puzzles, Reiner (as he’s asked you to call him) will sometimes give you a few sympathy coins for sheer persistence. If you do really well at a puzzle, you might find yourself earning some bonus coins, too. (Thanks, Reiner!) Even though some of the cities are going to cost you quite a few coins — sympathy or otherwise to access — at least you only have to pay once to unlock that destination.

Each city you visit with Reiner has a splashscreen of that country’s flag and a graphic of your puzzle location; Reiner also is appropriately dressed. In Greenland, you’ll see the snow falling, and Reiner definitely looks a little chilly standing there. The first time you play each level of a game, you will get a little tutorial on how to play the game. You’ll play all the games on the touchscreen. The upper screen, along with Reiner and your location atmosphere, will show your score goal and your current score. You’ll see which level of the game you’re currently playing as well. Make sure you pay attention to that tutorial, because you’re only going to get it the first time you try that puzzle at that level.

Most of the puzzles in Brain Voyage seemed familiar — but with a twist. In Greenland, for example, you’re looking for lost equipment hidden under the ice. It’s a lot like a combination of Minesweeper and Battleship but without any catastrophic consequences. (I have to confess: I played a few bad rounds on purpose, just to see if the ice would crack open.) Cape Town had probably my least favorite puzzle. It’s called Sea Life, and you have to count little colorful sea creatures on sonar against the clock. I’ve found that no matter my best intentions, I can only count so fast. If you get tired of counting, you’re given three potential amounts of creatures, but you lose points for guessing wrong. In London, you’ll need some math skills. You play Operators for the Bank of England and have to insert operands to make equations come to the same total, or insert operands into an equation to make it equal zero. It can be tricky, that one.

Remember those other modes of play I mentioned? When you’ve played at least four, eight or 16 different puzzles in the World Tour, you can play a random assortment of those puzzles in Random Mode to try for a high score. The Puzzle Bank lets you grab any of the puzzles you’ve saved and give them another try. DS Download Play lets you broadcast a game to a friend’s DS. Note that you’re just letting them play the game. You’re not playing head to head or anything like that. All of your gameplay in Brain Voyage is going to be against the computer and trying to beat your own previous high score.

The graphics for Brain Voyage, while not exactly stretching the DS to its limits, get the job done. The music bounces along while you play. Honestly, these factors didn’t mean that much to me. The puzzles were the thing.

I believe Brain Voyage would be a bit complex for the younger set. The tutorial requires reading. There are graphics to go with it, but to really understand, you need to read those instructions. Even with my daughter’s reading skills, I’m not sure she’d get the gist of the games. I, however, had a good time playing Brain Voyage. Since each puzzle is randomly generated, I can have fun trying my favorites again and again. There are some I wouldn’t choose to play (like Sea Life), but overall, I see this as a game I can come back to for some quick and fun brain challenges.