Brain-teasers hit just right when I’m not in the mood to engage with RPG mechanics or fast-paced action. If you want to sharpen the mind too, check out these brain-teasers you can play in your browser.

7

Unscrabbled

I love Scrabble, and there’s not a week that goes by I don’t at least play it once with my partner. Unscrabbled takes the concept and adds an arcade-like quality to it by giving you the goal of earning as many points as possible in a limited number of turns.

That’s not the only twist though, because the board is constantly changing. Whenever you complete a word, which you can also make diagonally, those letters disappear and the ones above shift down. And with those limited moves, your best strategy is to take your time finding the most valuable word.

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6

2048

I’ve never completed a Rubik’s Cube, but I imagine the feeling you get from getting positioning right is the same in 2048. The goal is to shift tiles around, which combine if they’re the same number, but when you shift, say, to the right, all tiles move to the right if they have the room. Every time you shift, a new tile is added, and it’s game over if you run out of space.

This simple rule makes getting a really long streak the feeling you chase. It is so satisfying to see multiple tiles combine, one after another. I love the close calls, too. When you’re down to just a few open tiles and suddenly you see a path out!

5

Thief Puzzle

Thief Puzzle has the same vibes as the old flash games I used to play back in the day. All you have to do is successfully steal something valuable from unsuspecting victims. Given its stick figure art, it’s the perfect blend of silliness and difficulty.

It isn’t just the satisfaction of finding the right route to lift someone’s purse, but watching the theft and aftermath. When you get away with theft (or lose), you’ll see your victim’s reaction. There are two per level (and are 400 levels), so it comes out to 800 humorous animations.

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4

Escape From Castle Claymount

Trace is one of my favorite escape room games and the same developer, colorbomb, released more. Escape From Castle Claymount is still an elaborate escape room, but different, given its emphasis on story and a cast of characters. The art style and atmosphere is notably different too, with more of a miniature look, lovely character designs, and natural lighting.

Like Trace, I love Escape From Castle Claymount for its puzzles, which are some real brain-teasers. The fun of solving them comes from the steady collection of information, culminating in an “aha” moment. I don’t recall a time I felt cheated by a puzzle.

3

Kitsu

Pushing boxes around doesn’t sound like fun, but in the context of a sokoban game, like Kitsu, it’s actually quite the brain-teaser. Rather than shift boxes into a specific order to reach the end, Kitsu has you transforming into nearby objects. If you match with two of the same objects in a room, they’re destroyed.

Ideally, you want to destroy the objects in the right order to reach the hearts trapped behind them. It sounds so simple, but that basic mechanic adds depth to the puzzle. The extra layer of challenge is having to do it in one go, as resetting will have you start at the beginning.

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2

Fragments of Euclid

What about a brain-teaser game that’s both stimulating to play and a work of art? Fragments of Euclid takes worlds inspired by artist M.C. Escher and gives you the room to explore. It sounds straightforward, but once you start interacting with different doorways and visual weirdness, you’ll realize you can’t trust intuition.

The fun of the game comes from getting disoriented over the layout. More often than not, I found myself thinking, “Wait. I’ve already been here before.” Being able to create a mental map of the rooms will be integral. Oh, and I get to fulfill my fantasy of entering an M.C. Escher piece.

1

Xenospore

There’s something really satisfying about being efficient in a game like Pandemic, where you’re the virus and you have to spread as far as possible. Xenospore is the opposite and is turn-based. What a weird combination I wasn’t expecting to engage with.

The brain-teaser lies in efficiency. How do you destroy enough of the deadly alien fungus in a single turn and prevent it from spreading? There’s a sequence of decisions that works best and it’s engaging to get the beat right.

When I’m down for a brain-teaser, I always lean into games with a unique mechanic, and that’s shared among all my favorites. Very few are numbers-based, like 2048, which, funnily enough, still has a game mechanic to make multiplying stimulating.