Literature, played in your head.

The cards land and you start sorting them into books before you have thought about it. Your visual cortex reads the faces while parietal areas help keep count of what you hold.

Most active: visual cortex, intraparietal sulcus

Who asked whom? For which card? Did they get it? Every question happens in the open and nothing is written down for you. You hold the table in working memory while the hippocampus helps bind each ask to its player.

Most active: hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Arun asks Kavya for the queen of spades. She says no. Now you know two things: Kavya does not have it, and neither does Arun, because nobody asks for a card they hold. The prefrontal cortex does the heavy lifting when you combine separate facts into a new one.

Most active: dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, frontopolar cortex

The queen of spades is with Kavya, Meera or Dev. Arun asks Kavya and gets nothing. A few turns later, Dev asks you for it. The table has already told you more than you think.

Most active: frontopolar cortex, intraparietal sulcus

Your teammate asks for the nine of hearts. So they hold another heart from nine to ace, and they want you to notice. Reading people, not just cards, engages the temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex.

Most active: temporoparietal junction, medial prefrontal cortex

Think your team has every card of a book? Claim it, but be sure. If even one card sits with the other team, the whole book goes to them. The orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex track value and the chance of being wrong; you bring the nerve.

Most active: orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex