According to various domains of psychology, people are cognitive misers, resource rational, and generally averse to mental effort. And yet, people find it enjoyable to read books, watch films, play games, solve puzzles, etc. Studies attempting to show that people willingly exert mental effort rarely find unanimous support, with people differing in the extent to which they engage with various cognitive tasks. The "Need for Cognition" scale is supposed to explain such individual differences. However, the kinds of tasks that are used in mental effort experiments tend to be 'academic' in nature (e.g., anagrams, arithmetic, puzzles), suggesting that the scale may be more reflective of interest and engagement in a particular kind of mental effort. Here, we develop four different tasks - two of which are academic (a word- and number-based game) and two that are more generally interesting (a dating- and a sports-based game). Participants are asked about their interest in the different tasks and then assigned to either their first or last choice (or assigned to a task at random). After performing the task for several minutes, participants complete the Need for Cognition scale, and self report their effort, engagement, frustration, boredom, and comfort with the background knowledge necessary to perform the task. We use these data to test the idea that Need for Cognition predicts mental effort regardless of the type of task, and regardless of whether the task was something they would prefer to do.