Best brain training games: riddles, brain teasers, puzzles and more

Brain training games are games that allow players to complete tasks that practice specific cognitive skills that exercise their memory, attention span, logic and fast thinking. Brain training activities can range from puzzles, video games and board games, and they all come in varying degrees of difficulty. Despite being fun to play, each of these games has some added benefits for your brain, too – from helping to develop your problem-solving and reasoning skills to improving your eye for detail and abstract thinking abilities.

Research shows that brain training games have been proven to make a “major impact on cognitive function.” As you play brain games that involve critical thinking, logic and creativity, your brain is adapting and rewiring itself to improve its performance. Or, if you play a game that tests your ability to remember visual patterns, it can enhance your brain’s ability to spot patterns. Likewise, memory-boosting games can help with recall and word or number puzzles can compel your brain to uncover hidden solutions – all of which, over time, can help improve cognitive functions and keep your brain “young.”

There are endless free brain games on the internet that you can play to give your brain a workout. Want to experience that feel-good moment when you finally figure out the missing piece to a tricky brain puzzle or when you finally crack a tough riddle? Just check out our giant collection of the best brain training games, puzzles and problems below for some awesome brain activities that you can do either by yourself or with a group of friends.

To put it simply, a brain teaser is a type of puzzle or brain game, often involving lateral thinking. That means to solve it, you’ll have to use a creative, less straightforward thought process and the solution won’t be right in front of you. There are varying difficulty levels for brain teasers, but their main objective is to make you think more critically. Solving these games boosts brain power, keeps your memory strong, and keeps everyone entertained.

Check out these 25 brain teasers for kids that will beat boredom.

There are different forms of riddles, which are a statement, question, or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved.

Challenging riddles are serious brain training exercises that test your ability to solve hard problems within a short time span.

The best riddles for kids are geared toward children and use age-appropriate questions to test their brain function.

“What am I?” riddles put your smarts to the test with tricky riddles that usually illustrate one sentence or phrase that you have to guess what it belongs to.

Test your wits with our hardest riddles ever. Can you solve them?

Logic puzzles come in many forms – matrix logic puzzles, mystery story riddles with clues, and even well-known visual games like Sudoku and crosswords are all examples. Logic puzzles challenge your brain by presenting a series of clues, and it’s the player’s job to determine the solution, which is why this type of thinking can improve your problem-solving, critical thinking and reasoning skills.

Don’t miss these 12 logic puzzles that will test your smarts.

There are many different types of visual brain teasers out there, but they are all a type of puzzle that involves visual thinking in order to be solved. Players are usually presented with a picture that has patterns that they need to identify or specific objects they need to spot. The brain benefits of visual puzzles can vary depending on what kind you do, but many encourage creativity and abstract thinking – and they all work your problem-solving skills.

The internet can’t figure out how many triangles are in this image. Can you?

“Which one doesn’t belong” is another type of visual puzzle. In this series of puzzles, all of the objects look similar with a few minor differences – but it’s your job to figure out which one doesn’t belong with the rest. These puzzles are good for “warming up” your brain to practise problem-solving skills and honing your attention to detail, since you have to zero in to spot the odd one out.

Are you one of the 10 percent of people who can spot the odd one out in this picture?

You’ve probably played a “spot the difference” game before, where you compare two nearly identical images and look for subtle differences between the two. The instructions will tell you how many differences you need to spot and circle – which, according to studies, activates your right posterior parietal cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for how a person directs their attention, their spatial perception, and their visuomotor control.

“Find the hidden objects” puzzles test your ability to find something “unique” within the picture. The hidden object is often simple, maybe a dog, a cat or a bunny rabbit. However, throwing in a series of confusing shapes, colours and other objects that look really similar to what you’re looking for, makes for some tricky visual brain teasers.

Can you find the 15 hidden objects in this picture?

Sudoku puzzles are solved with logic and don’t require you to have any math skills aside from knowledge of simple counting. There are different levels, from easy to hard, depending on your skill level and experience with the game. To play, you must fill the numbers 1-9 in each row, each column and each mini box, without any duplicates – it’s trickier than it sounds!

Here are 10 Sudoku tips that’ll help you win.

Rebus puzzles, also known as word picture puzzles or picture riddles, use images and/or words to convey a phrase or message, typically a common idiom or expression. Beyond testing your abstract thinking abilities, rebus puzzles can improve your critical thinking, language and logic skills.

Check out these 20 rebus puzzles that are almost impossible to solve.