Mental Tiles (Mentalsteine) by Harry Keyl, Eckhard Boettcher

Another beauty from the Dutch magic dealer and craftsman Harry Keyl.  This is a wonderful piece of mentalism that fits neatly in your pocket and is always ready to go.  It does not require any memory work or special moves.  You follow a simple procedure and can predict the chosen number every time. It looks very convincing and the spectator can chose different numbers each time and yet the prediction is correct every time.  Also, the final prediction can be different each time too if you desire.

This effect is a very clever version of Bob Mason’s Predicta Total but to be honest you probably won’t even realize this even if you are familiar with Bob’s effect because Mental Tiles is so clean and simple to use, it hides the method even better than the original effect.

Harry Keyl’s work looks very similar to the work of the Dutch master Eddy Taytelbaum and are very rarely seen these days.

Effect: This trick gives you two elegant two-tone boxes with sliding lids, which are made from very expensive, high-quality Plexiglas material.

The first box is elongated and contains four blocks with engraved digits that, when placed next to each other, give a number as a prediction. This box is given to a spectator for safekeeping at the beginning of the performance.

You remove the sliding cover of the larger box. Inside there are nine rectangular blocks, immovable in small depressions, with different engraved numbers on the front and different colored fields on the back. You tip all the blocks on the table so that all the colored sides are facing up.

Now the spectator can use the blocks to form a three-digit number according to a simple rule of the game. To do this, he chooses one of the colored pieces, turns it over and puts it back in the box with the number facing up in the first recess of the first row.

Then he also freely chooses a second and third block, which are also turned over and placed in the depressions next to the first stone. In this way the first three-digit number was created and in the same way the viewer forms a second and third row of numbers underneath.

I emphasize once again: the viewer really has free choice and a wide variety of ways to form the three numbers. A spectator adds up these three numbers and receives the result, for example, 1675.

The spectator who has the small box in safekeeping is now asked to open the box and it turns out that the four stones in it also form the number 1675 !!!

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