Mental Agility Games to Play at Home

Mental agility games help our brain dexterity. What's more, they're very entertaining and can be played with the family.

Learning is the quintessential way for people to develop and improve their neurons, brain, and mind. And, among the many ways we have to learn, games are an ideal strategy to do so. In this sense, there are many mental agility games that will help us to exercise and enhance our brain.

Let’s learn more about mental agility games

Mental agility games, or mind games, are a playful way to stimulate the brain’s functions. That is, they’re games that promote the creation of new neural networks and improve the existing ones.

They’re games that allow us to sharpen our cognitive skills and get our mental abilities and skills to develop, increase and improve. We’re talking about skills such as the following:

• Calculation
• Reasoning
• Perception (to identify similarities and differences)
• Spatial organization
• Memory
• Concentration
• Language

Thus, there are different mental games that help us to strengthen and sharpen our brain and wit. Among them, we can include riddles, logic and memory games, puzzles, and word games, as well as crossword puzzles, word searches, or the Hangman game. In addition, there are also mental games related to numbers and mathematical calculation, such as the famous Sudoku.

Fun mental agility games to play at home

We’ve made a small compilation of some mental agility games to do at home, and all of them have the particularity that they can be played in pairs or in groups, so they’re perfect for sharing with your family.

Intertwining words with Scrabble to improve language skills

We can’t forget to mention this famous game. Scrabble’s a game that’s a real challenge for our brain. What’s more, it helps to improve our vocabulary. For those who don’t know it, it’s a challenge in which participants have to build words, both horizontally and vertically, with the letters they have in their possession, which they’ve obtained at random.

Scrabble consists of a board on which players place tiles with letters (vowels, consonants, and some wilds). The objective is to form words with the letters that each player has, taking advantage, when possible, of some other letters that our opponents have already laid down.

The longer the words are, and the more complicated the vowels and consonants we use in them, the better, because all the letters have a different point value.

Problems that challenge our reasoning

Nowadays, we can find many mental agility games on the internet that consist of problems in the form of word games or riddles that we must solve. In order to play them and solve them, we have to use reasoning, deductive capacity, and logic.

In this sense, here’s an example of this type of game based on problems:

“Maria, Peter, and John, at a dinner with friends, talk about the money that each of them has saved for their vacations. Maria says, “I have 600 dollars, that is, 200 less than Pedro, and 100 less than John. Then Peter says: “I’m not the one who has the least savings. The difference between my savings and John’s is 300 dollars—he has 900 dollars. And finally, John argues that he has fewer savings than Mary, since she has 700, and Peter has 300 more than Mary.”

Now, Mary, Peter, and John each make two statements, one true and one false. So, can you tell what Mary, John, and Peter’s savings are? Have a go at this problem with your family!

Learning and memorizing demonyms to improve our mental agility

A demonym is an adjective that denotes a relationship with a geographical place, whether it’s a neighborhood, a town, a city, a province, a state, a nation, a country, or a continent.

In this sense, you can learn and memorize the demonyms of different places, as the name of a place doesn’t always directly match its demonym. In other words, the two words may have very little resemblance.

So, let’s look at other examples:

• New Zealand: New Zealander, Kiwi
• Canada: Canadians
• Trinidad and Tobago: Trinidadian or Tobagonian
• Lesotho: Mosotho, as a group; Bashotho, individually.
• Halifax: Haligonian
• Philippines: Filipino

So, are you prepared to look for and learn many other demonyms along with your family? We’re sure you’ll be surprised by the particular names you come across.