Do Puzzle Games Make You Smarter? An Honest Look
Published
It is a tempting idea. Spend ten minutes a day on puzzles and come out with a sharper memory and a quicker mind. Whole businesses have been built on the promise. As a site that offers puzzle games, we would love to tell you it is true. The honest answer is more modest, and in some ways more interesting.
What practice definitely does
If you play a puzzle regularly, you will get better at that puzzle. This is not in doubt. Your first game of Tile Merge 2048 will be a muddle, and your fiftieth will be organised. You will see patterns sooner, plan further ahead and make fewer careless moves.
You will also tend to improve at puzzles that are similar. Someone who has learned to solve a Sliding Number Puzzle methodically will find other tile puzzles easier, because the same approach applies.
What it probably does not do
The larger claim is that practising a game improves your thinking in general: that memory games give you a better memory for names and shopping lists, or that reaction games make you a safer driver. Researchers call this "transfer", and it has proved much harder to demonstrate.
One of the best known tests was a British study published in 2010, in which more than eleven thousand volunteers practised brain-training tasks online for six weeks. They improved at the tasks they practised. On general tests of reasoning and memory that they had not practised, there was no meaningful gain.
A group of psychologists reviewed the whole body of evidence in 2016 and reached a similar conclusion. Training reliably improves performance on the trained tasks, sometimes on closely related ones, and there is little solid evidence that it lifts everyday thinking. In the same year, the maker of one popular brain-training app agreed to pay a settlement to the American consumer regulator over advertising claims it could not back up.
Research continues, and not every scientist reads the evidence the same way. But anyone who promises that a game will raise your intelligence is claiming more than is known.
So is there any point?
Yes. Several, in fact. They are just more ordinary than the adverts suggest.
Puzzles give you practice at thinking habits. Working through Lights Out teaches you to stop pressing things at random and look for a method. Treasure Dig rewards gathering evidence before you guess. These are habits, not raw brainpower, and habits are something you can choose to use elsewhere.
Some games rehearse useful facts. Math Sprint will not make you a mathematician, but it will make your times tables faster, and that is a real skill you use directly.
They hold your attention. Ten minutes absorbed in a puzzle is ten minutes of sustained concentration on one thing. For many of us that is rarer than it should be.
They are a proper rest. A puzzle with a clear answer is a pleasant change from problems that have none. People often come back from a short game calmer and more willing to tackle whatever they were avoiding.
They are satisfying. Solving something is enjoyable, and enjoyment needs no further justification.
What does help the brain
If your real aim is to stay mentally sharp, the general advice from health bodies is consistent, and puzzles are only a small part of it. Regular physical activity, enough sleep, time with other people and learning things that are new to you all come up again and again. The last one is worth dwelling on. A skill that is unfamiliar and difficult, such as a language or a musical instrument, appears to stretch you more than repeating a game you already know well.
That offers a useful hint for puzzle players. Variety and challenge matter. Once a game has become automatic, the benefit of practising it is mostly gone, pleasant as it may be.
How to get the most from puzzle games
Switch games when one becomes easy. The effort is the useful part.
Set yourself a harder target. Do not just finish the puzzle. Finish it in fewer moves.
Explain your method to someone else. Putting a strategy into words is a good test of whether you really have one.
Play with other people when you can. A shared game adds conversation, which is good for you in its own right.
The bottom line
Puzzle games will make you better at puzzle games, may sharpen a few habits of thought, and will give you a pleasant and absorbing break. They are unlikely to raise your intelligence. Play them because you like them. That has always been reason enough. The puzzle section is here when you want it.