It seems as though some of us are just born with a bigger brain than others. We excel at school, go on to do well at university, or impress others with our mental capabilities in the workplace. Unfortunately, if you’re blessed with an excess of intelligence, then some of the games that you can find for your mobile might leave you feeling a little understimulated. Games that are fun for others simply don’t pose enough of a challenge. If any of this sounds familiar, or you’re keen to give your brain a good workout and join the leagues of the super-smart, then we’ve got some mobile apps that will keep that brain thinking long after you’ve finished playing them.
Duolingo
If your special skills involve linguistics in particular, then you’ll love this language-learning app. Duolingo used the talents of thousands of different bilinguals to develop an app that helps you to learn languages in a way that simulates how a native speaker would learn in real life. You’ll begin by building a small vocabulary of words using their fun mini-games.
Next, you’ll learn how to correctly string those words together to build important phrases. Whilst it always takes a long time to build a new language up to fluency, Duolingo makes it possible to take huge strides towards language learning in as little as five minutes a day. Not only this, but the game-like structure of the learning means that it never seems like a chore and the competitive element works as a huge incentive for those who like to compete against friends.
Poker
Poker is a great option for the brainy gamer, as the more you improve at the game, the more you realize there is to learn. Most of us will begin by learning about the hand rankings and working out how to get the best hand possible in order to win. This is the foundation of any good strategy, but the mathematicians will tell you there’s so much more to poker than that. Working out percentages in your head to determine pot odds is a difficult skill to learn, but it can make a big difference to your gameplay.
It’s an easy game to find for mobile, too. There are plenty of top poker sites that have poured endless time and money into developing the very best poker app. Of course, everybody has their differences in what they look for, but PokerNews has curated a list of their champions of the genre, which can be helpful when deciding which app to choose.
Lumosity
Finally, brain training apps have been around for a long time, but Lumosity is the first to really demonstrate its results. This app starts you off with a generalist quiz which helps to determine which areas of your brain are performing at their best and which could use some work. You’re then shown your results and asked which areas you’d like to work on. It might be that your memory is excellent but that your mental arithmetic is poor, so, chances are, you’ll want to work on that. Once you’ve decided which skills you’d like to work on, you can begin playing their mini-games. Each of the mini-games is endlessly playable and delivers results which you can see in the app’s personalized graphs of your progress.
