Training Your Brain Through Play: Six Games That Help Train the Mind

While games – particularly video games – tend to get a bad wrap for being time-wasting forms of entertainment, that really isn’t the case. Games represent a great opportunity to have fun with friends and socialise, and many of the best ones are works of art in their own right, featuring complex stories and detailed worlds and characters. 

Some games can even help sharpen the mind by improving the cognitive functioning of various areas of the brain, and in this article, you’ll learn about six of the best options for tapping into those benefits. 

Here are six games that, rather than being a mindless time sink, help promote a healthy mind!

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Mahjong originated in China, and quickly spread all over the world thanks to its simple, yet addictive gameplay. 

The game revolves around matching tiles with different patterns on them, and the first to match all of the tiles in their hand is the winner. The game helps improve memory as you try to remember what symbols have been played, as well as strategic thinking when you work to deduce what your opponents will do next. 

It can be played traditionally with a physical set and a tabletop, or you can choose to play online. 

Portal, and its sequel, Portal 2, are considered two of the best puzzle games of all time. 

You play as Chell, a ‘test subject’ at the Aperture Science facility. Why you’re there, or who the robotic voice is talking to you over the tannoy, remains a mystery; as well as being an excellent puzzle game, there’s a thrilling story to experience, too. 

The puzzles themselves revolve around Chell’s use of a portal gun: shoot one portal at a wall and another somewhere else, and you can walk through one to teleport out of the other side of the second. The puzzles can get very challenging, but the game offers some of the most satisfying payoffs of any of its type. 

When considering games that challenge the brain, your mind likely went straight to chess, and there’s a good reason for that. Chess is known worldwide for its deep, timeless strategy as you work to advance your pieces across the board and anticipate your opponent’s next move. 

Every player plays the game slightly differently from the next, and given that learning what each piece does is relatively straightforward, the game strikes a great balance between ease of play and strategic scope. 

Image Credit: Pexels

If you’re the proud owner of a Nintendo Switch and are looking for something to work the mind, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is a great bet. 

Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are excellent, too, of course, but Link’s Awakening hits the sweet spot of offering short bursts of challenge that are difficult enough but not too taxing. It also helps that the game is stunning to look at, channelling the top-down vibes of the Zelda games of the 1990s but with a fresh claymation art style. 

Scrabble will never go out of fashion, and with a wide variety of play styles available from the traditional board to video game versions, there’s a method of play to suit any setting and type of player. 

For the uninitiated, players work to make words from an assortment of lettered tiles for points, with more points scored for more complex words. The game will challenge your ability to think on the spot, but also has hidden depths in how it trains your ability to manage resources and think beyond the next word. 

The civilisation series is certainly one of the most complicated games on this list, but master its mechanics, and you’ve got an incredibly deep turn-based strategy title that works the brain in a myriad of different ways. 

The Civ series, of which VI is widely considered the best, places the player in charge of building a fully-functional civilisation and advancing through the ages, developing technology and negotiating with other civilisations to reach agreements, or even going to all-out war with them. 

The game will tax your logical reasoning skills and your ability to plan like no other, and there’s really nothing else quite like it. 

Wrapping Up

The process of playing games is far more than the sum of its parts, and there’s a lot more to this medium so far as the good it can bring than it’s given credit for. Hopefully, the games chosen above will offer proof of that sentiment for you. Have fun!

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