Brain games are a great way to improve your problem-solving skills.
What comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘games’? Entertainment, tournaments, happy time? While all of these are true, did you know that games significantly boost our mental agility and sharpen our skills? Yes, some games increase your intangible qualities, while others touch the tangible areas of your life.
Brain games are an excellent way to work your mental agility and cognitive sharpness in today’s fast-paced world, where people have short attention spans. Exercising them has numerous benefits in various aspects of your life, personal or professional.
It’s time to challenge yourself, which is why, in this post, I’ll cover some of the best brain games you can play.
Importance of Brain Games
Brain training games are specifically designed with a combination of puzzles and challenges that test your memory and force you to think strategically to move forward in the game. Just like we do physical exercise to keep our body healthy, it’s essential to do mental exercises to keep our brain functioning at its total capacity.
Brain games are just like a workout for your brain, targeting different function areas, such as:
- Memory
- Attention
- Problem-solving
- Reasoning
- Critical/Logical Thinking
It’s also a fun way to challenge your brain with diverse tasks, puzzles, and difficult levels, scientifically known to stimulate your neurons. They also help improve your decision-making skills, reaction time, and short-term memory.
Don’t believe me? Play these brain games firsthand and experience it for yourself.
Lumosity
Considered one of the world’s most popular brain training programs, Lumosity offers an array of games designed by neuroscientists to improve your flexibility, attention, problem-solving, processing speed, memory, and much more!
The games are designed to adapt to your capabilities. It comes with daily workouts, which, if taken with full commitment, help track your progress with detailed insights into your strengths and areas of improvement.
It has over 40 games, differentiated based on different challenges, such as math, speed, logic, problem-solving, language, etc. The challenges are personalized and intuitively go hand-in-hand with your level of cognitive capabilities.
So, sit back and relax as you set out to enjoy beautifully crafted puzzles carefully curated by scientists and designers.
➡️ Download: Android
Elevate
Elevate is an excellent choice if you struggle with spoken or written language and math skills. The app helps you challenge your brain in reading, writing, listening, and calculating.
It comes with a 7-day free trial and a free version, so you can get on board right away. As you log in to the app, it analyses your cognitive skills and provides a personalized learning program, automatically adjusting with time to improve your capabilities.
One of the best features of Elevate is the ability to track your performance, helping you analyze yourself and yourself against others. With time, you can feature your accomplishments and opportunities.
In addition, it also comes with adaptive progression, meaning the exercises get harder as you progress in your tests. With over 150 achievements to win, I am sure this will keep you busy for long.
➡️ Download: Android
Peak
Peak is a bit more competitive when it comes to challenges. It covers a wide range of cognitive skills via 40+ games designed to enhance memory, attention span, language, math, mental agility, and problem-solving skills.
Like other games in this list, this one also comes with a personalized training program that adapts to your performance and goals. Along with reports, it helps you with success rates and where you stand compared to other users to give you that required inspiration.
What’s unique, you ask? Well, it has a fantastic feature called the Coffee Break workout, which is designed to be completed in 5 minutes. This makes it easier for you to use it during quick breaks or short travel duration. After its recent update, you can select specific workouts for your needs.
➡️ Download: Android
Sudoku
The timeless classic, Sudoku, is the perfect mix of brain-teasing and competition, and it’s thoroughly enjoyed by the young and old. This number puzzle game has gained immense popularity over a period of time for its brain-stimulating benefits.
It consists of the classic Sudoku game and hundreds of unique challenges. For those new to this, you must fill a 9×9 grid with numbers so that each column, row, and 3×3 subgrid contains all the digits from 1 to 9 without repetition.
Sounds easy? Challenge yourself to solve it as quickly as possible. This game comes with over 5,000 puzzles with 5 balance levels of difficulties. Don’t worry; you can start with easy levels, and if you’re still stuck, use a hint to your disposal.
It’s free to use, can be played offline, and comes with several attractive color themes that you can apply to make learning fun. All of this makes it one of the best sudoku apps you can find today!
➡️ Download: Android
Crossword Puzzles
Another iconic addition to the list is our old yet lovable Crossword Puzzles, which many of us have spent hours solving. Embrace the joy again by downloading this game, offering you the same crossword puzzles but in a much better and more fun setting.
Rather than the old version, where you’d manually think and fill in the words, this game has an activity circle containing a list of alphabets to make words across and up.
The best part is this game is available in more than 10 languages, so you can use it to enhance your native language vocabulary. While it does help you become a grammar nazi, crossword games are the best option for those looking forward to improving their language capabilities, vocabulary, and problem-solving skills.
➡️ Download: Android
Brainwell
Brainwell is not just another game; it’s a fully developed, scientifically-backed wonder that will help you become the best version of yourself! To begin with, you’ll have to complete three online Brainwell fitness tests that’ll assist the algorithm in preparing a unique personal brain program for you.
After this, feel free to challenge yourself with daily games, including cognitive workouts. With more than 50+ games to choose and play from, you can enjoy this non-stop self-skilling on your tablet or mobile phone.
The challenges are designed to help train your brain to full capacity, promoting concentration, productivity, critical thinking, and focus. The games are engaging and progressively challenging, ensuring that you stay motivated and see continuous improvement.
If you’re competitive, you can invite your friends and family to compete against you in your favorite games.
➡️ Download: Android
Brain Age
Brain Age is an engaging game developed by Dr. Kawashima and is specifically designed to train your brain in minutes every day.
What sets this game apart is the enjoyable twist it brings to brain training. You can engage yourself in a collection of fun and immersive exercises meant to stimulate your brain in a fun way. It has structure, appeal, and intensity to keep you motivated and skilled at the same time.
Moreover, you can enjoy some quick games while you’re on the go, such as drawing, reading out loud, and 1 min math calculations.
The game gives you progress tracking to help you analyze your journey and identify which exercises to revisit to improve your scores and cognitive skills to beat your own score.
➡️ Brain Age is available on Nintendo Switch.
CogniFit for Kids
CogniFit is an expert in giving you personal plans, just like a gym trainer, but to train your brain. While adults have enjoyed a more serious and challenging version, the company has released a version for kids, which is much more interactive and fun and provides learning at total capacity.
It includes mental games that are a product of their patented system designed to enhance your brain’s capabilities. You can set your daily goals and accomplish them to increase your scores and flaunt your leaderboard rank.
Moreover, it allows you to develop a plan of action to practice and train as per your preferences. CogniFit for Kids is perfect to help build your child’s intellectual growth from an early age, and you can witness the results in their report cards. As one of the best educational video games for kids, you’ll be hard-pressed to find something better than this for your children!
➡️ Download: Android
Fit Brains by Rosetta Stone
One of the most effective language-learning programs you’ll find, Fit Brains by Rosetta Stone, was specially designed to build fluency in written and spoken foreign languages.
The platform gives you over 25 language learning options, and you can choose the one you’re best interested in. The algorithm is designed to tap into your brain’s innate ability to learn a language using phonetics and other tricks to help you learn easily.
You’ll also be picking up a new language with the help of real-world scenarios, interactive activities, and audio from native speakers. Besides, the app comes with a captivating set of mini-games that can be utilized to tap into your mental faculties.
You can do all of this at your own pace and improve your skills with the help of their expert feedback and live coaching with native speakers.
Closing Thoughts
Since learning is a continuous process, brain training games are a perfect way to make it fun. By regularly incorporating these games into your routine, you can improve your cognitive skills and mental abilities in an immersive and thrilling way.
I’ve ensured that each app mentioned in this list is unique and offers you something new. This way, if you’re done with one, you can simply move on to the next and feel free to upgrade and challenge yourself.
Pick your favorite and embark on the journey to a more agile mind today!
Next, discover the best scratch games for enhancing your kid’s coding skills.
