What are the best brain training games?

01What makes a brain game worth playing

A good brain game gives you a clear goal, a quick round and a reason to try again. The best ones start easy, get harder as you improve and tell you right away whether you were right, so each round teaches you something about the game.

Enjoyment matters more than it sounds. Research on brain training finds that people reliably get better at the tasks they practice, so the games worth choosing are the ones you’ll keep coming back to. Pick from several kinds rather than one, and you’ll practice a wider range of skills.

02Six kinds of brain games

Most brain games fall into six families. Each asks for a different kind of thinking:

03Logic puzzles

Logic puzzles reward patience more than speed. In Sudoku, every row, column and box holds each number once; in a one-line puzzle like Dot Path, you draw a single line through every dot exactly once. The skill is spotting forced moves: a dot with only one free neighbor has to be an end of the line, and once you mark it, much of the board follows.

They suit you if you like the click of everything fitting. Dot Path is the Wits daily puzzle, with a new level each day and no timer.

04Word games

Word games range from crosswords to anagrams to guessing a hidden word from color clues. They lean on vocabulary and on knowing how English words are usually built: common letters like E, A, R and T, endings like -ING and -IGHT, and pairs like CH and ST.

In Word Code, green means the right letter in the right spot and gold means the letter is in the word somewhere else. The quickest solvers use every clue in each new guess.

05Mental math

Mental math games ask for quick, accurate arithmetic, and a few tricks pay off fast: rounding and adjusting, splitting numbers into tens and ones, and checking whether an answer is the right size. Speed Math starts with sums up to 20 and adds multiplying, dividing and two-step sums as you clear levels.

06Memory and attention games

Memory games ask you to hold something in mind for a few seconds: where a card was, the order lights flashed in, or the items on a list. Echo Grid adds backwards rounds, where you repeat the sequence last to first.

Attention games are about responding to the right thing. The classic example is the Stroop effect, described in 1935: naming the ink color of a word is slower when the word spells a different color. Color Clash is built on it, and switches between tapping the ink and tapping the word so you can’t settle into one habit.

07General knowledge

Trivia gets left off many brain training lists, but recalling and connecting facts is a skill of its own. Timeline asks you to put events in order; Capital Dash and Flag Frenzy test geography.

Recalling something is different from rereading it. In a well-known 2006 study, students who practiced recalling short passages remembered more of them a week later than students who reread them. That measured memory for those passages, not memory in general, but it’s a good reason to quiz yourself.

08How to pick your mix

You don’t need every kind every day. A simple approach:

1. 1Choose one or two games from each family that you enjoy.
2. 2Play a few minutes most days, rotating between them.
3. 3Keep one game that feels hard, since that’s where you have the most to learn.
4. 4Drop any game you dread; there are plenty of others.

Wits does the rotating for you: each day pairs Dot Path with a set of quick games from different skills. All 43 games play in the iPhone app; on the web, a free Wits account plays Dot Path, Color Clash and Word Code.