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 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.
- 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.
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
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.
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.
Boardgames: Hanabi, The Voyages of Marco Polo, Innovation, Splendor ( I play all these at boardgamearena.com) Hanabi is especially good for logic, deduction.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)
Be warned, you can ruin friendships with this game
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/
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.
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.
- 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.
"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-... .
https://www.killersudokuonline.com/
https://www.kenkenpuzzle.com/
"Human Resource Machine" and "7 Billion Humans"
The Turing Test
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!)
A few friends of mine who don't have any formal math or comp sci experience have had fun on the site as well.
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.
https://www.5dchesswithmultiversetimetravel.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.