Ask HN: Which games do you recommend to improve thinking and reasoning? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which games do you recommend to improve thinking and reasoning?

46 pointsbehnamoh85 comments

Computer games, board games, etc. are accepted.

Go board game. This is the one game that changes as the way you change your thinking in life changes. It's also a two way street, in that lessons learned on the board can be applied in your real life decision making and conceptualizations. On the one hand, it's a board game, meant to teach tactics and strategy. On the other, it's a conversation between two players where ideas are laid out, interpreted, and the one-upmanship continues, with minor misunderstandings leading to local losses. The board is large enough that you can lose several of those and still recover to win. It most closely follows competing for market share and over-reaching exposes you to risk and large potential losses. The thing I like most is that the player's personality appears in their playstyle, and when confronted with a different playstyle may be required to adapt, as a fast and loose style doesn't stand up when it comes in contact with a 'thick' one.

Btw, the game server that I used was KGS[0] that has a nice easy to use client. Go gained some popularity so there could be other popular game matching sites/software now.

[0] https://www.gokgs.com/

> there could be other popular game matching sites/software now.

I like this one:

https://online-go.com

Can you recommend a physical board?

Yellow Mountain Imports has a range of high value boards and stones. I recommend getting the real stones and not the cheaper plastic imitations—the tactile difference is worth the modest cost increase.

I have no affiliation, just a happy customer.

Depends on what type of thinking and reasoning you're after. Different games will train different aspects.

Engineering and systems thinking games - Factorio, Dyson Sphere Project

Multitasking and heuristic decision making games - Starcraft, Dota

Physics and mathematics games - Kerbal Space Program

Out of all of these, my favorites to play are probably Dyson Sphere Project and Dota, but for pure mental training I always felt Starcraft was the hardest. Quick decision making and adaptation to the environment always made it feel like it kept me on the edge of my seat mentally. Dota has a team aspect, which can go a long way to helping (or harming) your ability to work as a team.

+1 for Factorio -- this is a great game -- highly addictive, although I found the battle part really annoyed me, and much preferred to play it in creative mode only.

IQ can be reduced through maltreatment, but in general we don't know how to increase IQ. Higher IQ people are more likely to play chess, but playing chess does not raise IQ. So just play the games you enjoy.

"Most people think playing chess makes you 'smarter', but the evidence isn't clear on that" https://phys.org/news/2019-07-people-chess-smarter-evidence-... .

Into the Breach - turn based strategy where you know what the AI plans to do on their next turn. The same studio made FTL, which I also highly recommend.

5d chess with multiverse time travel.

https://www.5dchesswithmultiversetimetravel.com/

This might be a captain obvious-type answer...but have you thought about Chess?

Some lessons from chess:

- Importance of overconfidence. If you think you can't lose, very often that belief will itself cause you to lose, as you get careless. Your opponent, meanwhile, is in a "fighting for their life" mindset and will often play surprisingly well. Similarly, when you play a weaker opponent, it's hard not to play carelessly.

- Working on your weaknesses. Anyone who gets really good in chess, has set out to find their weaknesses and fix them, one by one.

- The better the player, the more time they spend considering their opponent's next moves, possibilities, resources, plans, compared to their own.

- Accuracy of calculation. One slip during hours and it can all be for nothing. And also trusting yourself, not endlessly rechecking but calculating once (or twice!) and believing in your thought. Then when you do make a blunder, not dwelling on it but recovering quickly psychologically, starting afresh.

- Learning from defeat. To get better you study your losses and where you went wrong, get to know the characteristic mistakes you make and why, and do something about it.

One particular thing I learned from playing chess, which turned out to be applicable in business/office-environment, is the idea of creating "space" for yourself. It's a little hard to convey without making it seem trivial, but let's say someone is acting aggressively, you can sort of box them away from you a bit (in chess you would use pawns for this, in business any proxy will do) and give yourself space to operate (move your pieces around, get you project done), and once you've got them boxed away you can relax and do what you need to do, you don't have to worry about them for a comfortable amount of time.

It's this particular sense of space which I found was improved by playing a fair amount of chess, and there were moments when I had to deal with more aggressive people and I found that I wasn't so flustered because I knew I could create space when I needed it.

Well put, I’ve found myself thinking about a similar takeaway in my work.

When I was a beginner I always counterattacked. Now I see that that most attacks (and counterattacks) are built on insufficient foundations and assumptions; better to develop, create space, anticipate your opponent and build a plan. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, but that plan is better than no plan, or imprecise aggression.

lichess.org is the site the ancient game of chess deserves

i use the short puzzles to both focus my concentration, as well as gauge my cognitive depletion levels

good list, looking forward to more interesting responses ;)

simple geometric games work well too. the purity of ms-dos era xonix is profound

https://js-dos.com/games/

I really like playing "Immersive Sim" games (aka Prey, System Shock, Deus Ex, etc) because they generally have really tough combat but open ended gameplay. This means you must think very carefully about every encounter to come out on top.

Obduction. It's from the creators of Myst. The puzzles are mostly well thought out and the entire experience is unique and highly enjoyable.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/306760/Obduction/

Check out HackTheBox.eu

Gamified hacking challenges that will teach you real life scenarios. There's a lot of web based challenges, but others include databases, root escalation, etc.

Project Euler is fun for anyone who likes logic puzzles. I enjoyed working on those problems as I was just learning to code, and some (maybe many?) can be solved without writing code.

A few friends of mine who don't have any formal math or comp sci experience have had fun on the site as well.

Game of thrones board game - fun, negotiation, persuation and strategy in one package. There is variaty of strategies how to win and each requires interaction between players. The best moments were about reasoning why to everybody should ally with you instead of others.

One of the most fun board games I've played, but it does take a while and requires like five players or so.

Its grandfather in the boardgames family is Diplomacy, that can be played by 2+ people.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)

Be warned, you can ruin friendships with this game

Hitman 3 - many many many of ways to complete missions and engages creativity in really cool ways while being immersive and still fun / free form.

Any Zachtronics game.

"Human Resource Machine" and "7 Billion Humans"

I thought the idea that games can improve thinking and reasoning was debunked? Dedicating your life to chess doesn't mean they can put you in the general's chair and you'll be a military genius, just means you'll be good at chess.

I don't think it's so black and white. Past a certain point playing chess isn't going to help you with anything besides chess. But I think games can serve as an introductory tool - for example a game isn't going to teach you to be a SWE, but it can provide a more approachable way to gain some initial familiarity with programming ideas.

Is a game the best way to learn or stay mentally sharp? Not when taken at face value, but after a long day of work most people can't sustain something like taking an online course. Playing games can be a good way to stay mentally active when the likely alternative is watching TV or browsing Reddit every night. You'll find studies on cognitive effects of gaming are highly dependent on the games used and the control conditions they were being compared to.

Yea, I read through this thread a bit. I think everyone is mixing up skills and "thinking and reasoning". A game that is exercising a skill will be transferable to other times you use that skill, like mental math from Monopoly. However "thinking and reasoning" isn't a skill. I'm not sure how you improve them but I imagine it's a factor of [natural talent, diet, sleep, gut fauna, cardiovascular health, diversity of experience, self-esteem, sense of security, etc].

Chess should help in impulse control and realizing the possibility and power of strategic thinking, which is thinking of a sort. For a lot of young people, that sort of wisdom could be very helpful in real life when a scam/easy money/grab the cash and run option shows up. The puzzle nature of tactics also trains the mind to intensely concentrate on one task.

Can’t see how chess would help much in “guess the next number”-type IQ tests. Chess at a certain level requires a very specific sort of pattern recognition that doesn’t really transfer. Sharp people do gravitate towards chess, and it is wonderfully egalitarian (cheap/ubiquitous) and culture-neutral.

exactly right. the only thing you get better at by playing a game is that game.

That seems like an overly strong claim. It's probably true for many games, where skill in the game leads to no meaningful skill or knowledge outside the game short other games with the same or similar mechanic. But that doesn't mean that games, universally, cannot have some value in imparting either knowledge or skill applicable beyond the game itself.

Take Factorio, as a for-instance. Intended or not (I've never read what the creators themselves thought about when making the game), it does, if someone pays attention, end up teaching the player both how to apply logic and some understanding of systems theory and basic operations research (optimizations). In particular, trying to manage the flow of objects (much like a real factory) through various points and the assembly/processing time. Now, are people sitting down and ending up with a basic understanding of operations research in a technical sense? Probably not, but in an intuitive sense, I'd wager that most come away with something.

Kerbal Space Program is another game that actually does end up forcing players, short absolute brute force like I've seen some people pull off, to consider the rocket equation and orbital dynamics (even if simplified). It spawned multiple series of YouTube videos teaching people higher level math and physics topics.

Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans (second a sequel to the first), can't really be brute forced. You have to learn some semblance of programming skills in order to complete all the challenges, short of cheating and finding solutions online. I suppose someone could try every program permutation and never learn anything, but they'd probably not have finished level 2 or 3 even if they started with the games when they were released.

no reasonable trial has found any video game to increase intelligence, which I believe is what the OP was asking about.

While not (directly) a thinking game, I have always thought that playing basketball and handball in my youth taught me how to lose in dignity. Lose without blaming the referee or the other team. It's probably somewhat easier to accept others being objectively better than you in casual adult life situations (e.g. job interviews) when you had to cope with losing in ball games as a kid.

I think this is true at the highest levels, but my experience with Go has been anything but. I've matured both on and off the board through playing it.

I don't know if this is the kind of answer you want, but to this day I swear that playing Kula World (also known as Roll Away in the US, I think) made me smarter. It requires spatial reasoning, which maybe isn't what you're looking for. The game starts being ridiculously simple, but the difficulty ramps up fast, and it forces you to think carefully about your movements. And since the scenarios are de facto discrete, you don't need to be mindful about precision, just focus on the logic of the puzzles themselves.

I think something like DOTA would be up there, if only because of the immense state space that you have the game and the ability to use your superior understanding of those options to come out ahead of your opponents. Raw mechanics are important at the highest levels, but you can get a lot of mileage through "out thinking" your opponents in draft, in itemization, and in general strategic decisions about what to do, where and when.

Games with an established online group are an awesome way to interact with the world at large.

Chess is near universal and can almost carry a chessboard wherever you go whether online or in person almost like card games or the New York parks with Chessboards everywhere.

Starcraft 2 has an establish online presence damn near over the entire world. Great casters and fun events, that are fun to watch. Progression path in Starcraft 2 is a clear path and the most transparent as far as effort to progress. This game gives you graphs and good replays of each game by default, so its geared towards progress. Has 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 modes plus a huuuge variety of other arcade and developed games.

Typical game of Starcraft 2 can be between 10 - 30 minutes and has a high ratio to fun and competitiveness, you feel your mind expand in each rank.

Check out the bronze to gm guides, here, well thought out with clear strategy, easy to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuS_PgtyAP8

Factorio if you're into engineering planning, or maybe community test chambers of Portal 2 for puzzles that can be picked up readily.

Magic: the Gathering is basically writing software and teaches how to optimize randomness ― high barrier to entry, unfortunately

The MTG Arena is free entry and free to play ...

Texas Hold'em

I'm not a fan of gambling for money conceptually, but I was surprised by how much I learned playing Texas Hold'em for small cash stakes with a group of friends.

I think the most generally applicable thing I learned is the idea of folding a bad hand, and that most of the time you should fold. It seems to come up in regular life quite often, and I used to routinely double down on bad hands in life. It's also impressive how someone who is "ahead" can sort of bully people off the table.

It does seem to be the case that playing for some interesting amount of cash is helpful or even necessary in order to properly stimulate the brain. I hear backgammon for money is totally different as well, with the introduction of the doubling cube.

Seconded. Poker is a generally applicable set of life skills, imo.

Any DOS adventure game from the 90s that maliciously threw impossible puzzles at you on a whim with no hints. The Dig is a fun one.

In terms of board games, the game of Hex is mathematically interesting in that the impossibility of a draw can be utilized to prove Brouwer's fixed-point theorem.

I really like the HexCells series and the similar (and slightly better) Tametsi, both available on Steam. They both play like classic Minesweeper, except the puzzles are designed so that you never have to guess--every move can be logically deduced from the available information.

I like HexCells Infinite for the huge amount of content from procedurally generated puzzles, but I love Tametsi for the incredible difficulty.

For getting out of the "just follow instructions" rut and for the joy of exploration, I can't recommend Outer Wilds enough. Go in absolutely blind, don't look anything up if you can help it. You'll have to piece together the story from (sometimes pretty obtuse) clues, and you'll have to fly your ship through a quasi-realistic physics simulation. There's no real permanent failure states, and no real dead ends.

I'd be truly shocked if anyone here on this website didn't enjoy this game, if not love it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/

One of the best games I ever played.

Mahjong. Only playing for a few years but quickly became my favorite board game ever (I play japanese riichi). Randomness and luck involved but also pattern recognition, reading the opponents hand, and of course the multiple strategies involved. There are a lot of rules that seems very complicated in the beginning but it's not hard to pick up as long as you understand the core concept of the game. And there are great video game versions too which makes it easier to learn and play if you don't have anyone to play with irl.

Slay the Spire changed how I think in some ways. It's a brilliantly designed deckbuilding roguelike that asks very clear questions about how strong your position is and what you can afford to gamble, one after another -- and it eventually turns out that betting too much and betting too little are very much alike in how they make you fall off the power curve in an iterated game.

I agree with others that games won't improve thinking in an abstract sense, but some games definitely become analogies that I come back to.

I just started playing “7 billion humans” on Switch. It’s like a simple programming language. You are given tasks that you have to complete by drag-and-dropping statements and commands into the code area to form a simple program, and then you run your program and observe if it’s successful. There’s even a debugger button for stepping through the code. It’s quite entertaining.

Rocket League. It will take a good amount of hours to learn mechanics, but this has been a game that really helped me out on learning routines and then being able to use those mechanics for intelligent plays. It's a lot about decision making and response time.

Prismata is a little known online card game with very simple rules but it's incredibly hard to master.

The community is pretty small, but active enough that you can usually find an opponent if you wait a few minutes. (But try to beat the computer first, it's hard enough!)

Chess, you can play for free at open source lichess.org.

Splitgate(free to download and play) if you want some action. You may not be the best or most accurate shooter, but using portals and thinking can bring you up the leaderboard more quickly than just beeing good at aiming.

Go. Rules are much simpler than chess, but it took computers much longer to beat humans.

Absolutely right answer. And plenty of places to play with others like https://online-go.com/

I like 'Sherlock' by Everett Kaser. It is the classic, a cat lives next to the blue house, a dog rides a bicycle, Who likes french fries.

Immensely configurable, I play with 6 x 6. If you get stuck it has a nice hint button.

The Witness

Of all the games I've played (which admittedly isn't many), the Witness felt the most like an IQ test.

Tetris games (quick-paced modern Tetris clones/block stackers like TETR.IO) are good for improving pattern recognition and, at higher levels, memorization (as in openers, perfect clear setups, etc ).

Be aware that any game on its own will only make you better at that specific game. The brain has enough plasticity to improve at one thing and dull at another. It's better to try different things.

While True: learn() is interesting. https://luden.io/wtl/

It is an interactive algorithms visualizer packaged as a game.

For escape the room style puzzles, I highly recommend Outer Wilds.

The game is incredibly smart and fun. I urge you to go in blind.

The "we were here" series is also great in this genre as a co-op experience.

Good examples on this thread. I'll add another one: Baba is you

This comment undersells quite possibly the best puzzle game ever made. Released in 2019, it's a block-pusher with a twist - the blocks themselves change the rules of the game.

$15, 12,000 reviews on Steam, Overwhelmingly positive (>95%). I got about 100 hours of gameplay out of it including all the secret levels. Here's a video of the game "outsmarting a professional engineer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE8zkSGl4q8

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/736260/Baba_Is_You/

Hades will help train you to be persistent and care for yourself in the face of adversity. And it’s a bloody computer game! Cheaper than (though not a replacement for) therapy.

Boardgames: Hanabi, The Voyages of Marco Polo, Innovation, Splendor ( I play all these at boardgamearena.com) Hanabi is especially good for logic, deduction.

Word Golf! Recent recipient of grant from Tyler Cowen. Super fun and approachable.

https://www.word.golf

Hanabi - a co-op game with surprising depth. You can get a physical version, but I would recommend going straight to hanab.live instead.

Elevate, available on mobile. It will make your brain sharper, and more attentive to detalis. While also horning your quick retail maths skills.

You won’t get better at thinking and reasoning in general. You will simply get better at thinking and reasoning at that particular game.

Nomic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic

Chess - 8x8 square board, a long time classic. Can be very beautiful.

Braid - shift how you think about time

Baba is you - change the rules of the game to win

Maybe not what you’re looking for but golf combines lots of thinking and reasoning with a physical connection.

Escape Rooms. As in the real life variety. Best played with good friends.

Each one is a unique experience, so YMMV.

The only thing games improve is thinking and reasoning “in the realm of that game”, or in very similar situations at best. It’s a sort of a brain-trainers scam.

So the question is why do you need thinking and reasoning - where are going to apply it, from this answer will depend everything else.

Antichamber, The Talos principle, Portal 1 & 2

these will twist your brain.

Poker and 3d-platformers & first-person shooters.

I feel like I learned more about business from capitalism lab than from a lot of business books / economic books I've read.

https://www.capitalismlab.com/

Basically just an economy sim but has just the right amount of depth I think. There are several people I've encouraged to play this game just because of how it well it communicates the economics of a software business vs brick and mortar.

Chess

Settlers of Catan taught me not to trust anyone, ever.

Feel this, the scarce resource conundrum changes everyone in ways you'll never know. Pick your friends wisely when you play this game, you'll want to try to stay friends... :D

Good Sudoku

Also Killer Sudoku and Kenken for the more arithmetically inclined.

https://www.killersudokuonline.com/

https://www.kenkenpuzzle.com/

Doppelkopf

Portal

The Turing Test

Set

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