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Problem Solving Games, Activities & Exercises for Adults

By: Angela Robinson | Updated: February 13, 2024

Here is our list of the best problem solving games, activities and exercises for adults.

Problem solving games are activities that require players to use critical thinking skills to solve puzzles. Example activities include escape rooms, Sudoku, and murder mysteries. The purpose of these exercises is to sharpen reasoning and decision-making skills in group settings and to do team building with employees.

These activities are a subset of remote team games , found in problem solving books , and are similar to team puzzles , team building brain teasers and team riddles .

This article contains:

• team building problem solving activities for employees
• free problem solving games for adults
• virtual problem solving activities for students
• group problem solving activities
• problem solving team builders

Here we go!

List of problem solving games & activities

From word and number puzzles to role-playing games, here is a list of inexpensive and free problem solving team builders that help groups practice the art of critical thinking and compromise.

1. Espionage! (Team Favorite)

For an exciting game of social deduction, check out Espionage! This thrilling experience will put your team’s wits and instincts to the test.

Espionage! offers the following:

• a 90-minute session led by an experienced host
• undercover teams of agents and spies
• challenging puzzles, tasks, and maneuvers
• team conversations to help uncover secret identities

The best part is we will bring all the necessary game materials to your preferred location. If you are interested in boosting communication and critical-thinking skills within your team, then consider Espionage!

Learn more about Espionage!

2. Art Heist: The Vanishing of Van Gogh (Hosted)

You can turn your team into skilled detectives with Art Heist: The Vanishing of Van Gogh! In this captivating mystery, participants will locate the stolen artwork, The Bedroom .

Key features of this experience include:

• a 90-minute adventure led by a world-class host
• detailed puzzles, clues, and mysteries to unravel
• trails of evidence and hidden secrets
• group discussions to find the art

Additionally, you can include a cocktail kit to spice up your event. Through Art Heist, you will enhance your team’s ingenuity and problem-solving skills!

Learn more about Art Heist: The Vanishing of Van Gogh .

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• icebreaker games
• bingo cards

3. War of the Wizards (Popular)

With War of the Wizards, teams roleplay as minions of powerful wizards to vanquish forces of evil. Participants will play thrilling games and go on a quest to restore harmony to the realm!

War of the Wizards offers the following:

• a 90-minute journey guided by a distinguished host
• immersive storytelling that transports players into a magical realm
• engaging activities like world-building, role-playing games, and storytelling
• opportunities for forming alliances, facing challenges, and going on quests

Through the power of imagination and teamwork, your team can overcome tasks and participate in an epic fantasy battle. To improve communication and bonds, include War of the Wizards in your agenda!

Learn more about War of the Wizards .

Sudoku is one of the most popular free problem solving games for adults. The objective of this game is to fill each box of a 9×9 grid so that every row, column, and letter contains each number from one to nine. The puzzle makes a great team challenge. To play Sudoku on Zoom, screen share the game board. Then, turn on the annotation features. Using the add text functions, participants can fill in the numbers on the grid.

We made a starter puzzle you can use in your next meeting or virtual team bonding session:

Here are more online Sudoku puzzles .

5. Crossword puzzles

Crossword puzzles are word games that ask players to fill in words based on clues. Words interconnect, and players must think critically about the surrounding words to select the right phrase for the space.

You can use an online crossword puzzle maker to create a custom puzzle. Here are a few themes you may want to consider:

• teammates’ tastes and interests
• company knowledge and history
• industry terms and trends

Or, create a miscellaneous puzzle just for fun.

We made a sample puzzle you can use for your game:

To complete puzzles during online meetings, you can use the share screen function and add text through annotations.

Or, subscribers can play the New York Times’ daily crossword puzzle virtually . Dictionary.com also offers a free daily online crossword puzzle .

Check out more vocabulary games .

6. Online Escape Rooms

Escape rooms are timed games that get groups working together to solve puzzles. Traditionally, players enter a locked room and must complete all puzzles in an hour or two to unlock the door. However, groups can also play escape rooms online.

Digital escape rooms typically come in one of two forms: in a Zoom room and led by a host, or in a choose-your-own adventure format via Google Forms or websites. To play escape rooms virtually, enter a video meeting and follow the prompts, or screen share the Google Form and work out the puzzles together.

Check out our full list of online escape rooms .

7. Murder Mysteries

Murder Mysteries are story-based games that ask players to take on the roles of suspects or detectives while trying to identify a killer. These games often involve reading lines from a script, searching for clues, and occasionally solving puzzles to get hints.

These games make participants pay attention to conversations, analyze other characters’ behavior, and search for hidden meaning in the script. Players must use their powers of observation and logic to unravel the mystery.

Check out our list of Zoom murder mystery games .

8. Treasure Hunts

Treasure hunts are scavenger hunts with intention. While virtual scavenger hunts often ask players to collect random items, treasure hunts require participants to locate clues that lead to other prompts and hints. The game typically ends with players finding a treasure or solving a mystery, sometimes both.

The treasure hunt can have a specific theme such as secret agent missions or a hunt for pirate treasure, or you can run a more general hunt. Teammates can either compete simultaneously via Zoom call, or can play the hunt on an app individually and compete to beat each other’s scores.

Check out our list of treasure hunt apps .

9. Poem or story challenge

Most team building problem solving activities for employees revolve around science, math, and logic. Poem/story challenges rely on writing skills and are sure to appeal to the language lovers on your team.

Each player receives a limited word bank to use to create a story or poem. Then, players have a few minutes to craft their pieces. Afterward, everyone reads out or screen shares their creations.

Here are a few word challenge activities you can do remotely:

• Found poems or stories : Participants make poems or stories out of words they find by visiting websites, searching emails, glancing out the window, or taking a walk or drive around the neighborhood.
• Random word generators : Teammates use a random word generator to populate a word bank, and must use each word in the poem or story.
• Poetry magnets : Group members make poems using poetry magnets. You can send poetry magnet sets to employees and assemble the verses on a cookie pan during a Zoom call. Or, teammates can play with poetry magnets online .
• Page poems: Participants receive one page of a book or magazine, and must make a poem or story by blocking out other words so only the chosen text remains visible. This activity is part storytelling, part art, since story crafters can illustrate the pages as part of the design.
• Ransom note stories or poems : Players cut out letters from magazines and must form new words to make poems and stories. Or, players can receive a mix of random letters, form words, and run the text through a ransom note generator .

These activities are suitable for teams and individual players.

10. Moral challenge

Some problems are ethical rather than factual. Moral judgment plays just as important a role in the decision-making process as technical prowess. Players can flex their moral problem-solving skills by tackling ethical dilemmas or social puzzles.

Here are some social problem solving games online:

• Moral machine
• Scruples – the game of moral dilemmas
• Morality play

To play these games, either download the apps, or pull up the website and then screen share the prompts. These games are best played when discussed as a group, because the more belief systems and opinions, the harder an issue is to resolve. These exercises provide practice for real-life conflict resolution.

You can find similar challenges on our list of online personality tests .

11. Frostbite

Frostbite is a group game that hones team leaders’ communication skills while sharpening teammates’ listening and cooperation skills. The premise behind the game is that a group of explorers gets caught in a snowstorm and must build a shelter. Frostbite has paralyzed the leaders’ hands and snow-blinded the rest of the team. The leader must give the team instructions to build a tent that can resist arctic winds.

To play Frostbite, each teammate wears a blindfold. Then, the leader gives directions. Once the structures are complete, players turn on a fan to test whether tents can withstand the wind.

Frostbite is usually an in-person game, however you can also play virtually. In the remote version of the game, teammates construct tents out of cards and tape, while the leader surveys the scene on screen.

This exercise demonstrates the challenges of leading remotely, as teams need to operate with minimal oversight or supervisor observation. Therefore, instructions need to be clear and direct to be effective.

Check out more team building games .

12. Virtual Hackathons

Hackathons are events where participants have a set amount of time to design and pitch a new product or solution. This type of event originated in the programming world and is often used to create new apps, however you can apply the game to any industry or school subject.

Virtual hackathons are online versions of the event. Teams enter the competition, then work with each other via virtual meeting software or remote work communication platforms to design the solution. At the end of the competition, teams pitch ideas to a panel of judges and a winner is decided.

To run a virtual hackathon, first announce the theme of the event and collect sign-ups. So that no teams work ahead, hint at the general idea of the issue, and only explain the precise problem when the event begins. Then, give teams anywhere from a few hours to a few days to complete the project.

Discover more virtual hackathon ideas .

13. Improv games

Improv games are excellent problem solving activities. These exercises force participants to think and respond quickly to keep scenes moving in a logical and entertaining way.

Here are some good problem solving improv games:

Banned words : Performers cannot say certain words. Scene partners will conceive of situations that encourage the actors to use those words, and the actors must find alternatives, such as using synonyms or taking the scene in a new direction.

Scenes from a chat : Audience gives a suggestion for a scene, and players act the scene out. Though it’s a fictional and often ridiculous scenario, actors must react to the situation and solve the problem in order for the scene to end.

Miracle cure : Miracle cure is a quick-moving exercise that follows a simple format. One player declares, “I have a problem.” Another player responds, “I have a….[random object.]” The first player then replies, “great! I can use the [random object] to….” and describes how they will solve the problem.

Check out more problem-solving improv games .

14. Spaghetti Tower

The spaghetti tower is a classic team building game. Participants gather uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows, and must construct the tallest freestanding tower.

During the in-person version, players must construct one tall freestanding tower. However, for the virtual version of the game, players construct individual towers. You can send groups to breakout rooms for the build, then reconvene in the main room for judging. Teams are judged on three main factors: number of towers, height, and uniformity.

This version of the game not only tests the structural integrity of the tower, but also consistency and quality control. This exercise teaches teams to align and collaborate remotely, and produce a consistent product even when far apart.

15. What Would You Do?

What Would You Do? is a simple situational game that challenges participants to react to different circumstances. To play this game, read prompts one by one, and then ask participants to respond with gameplans. You can use the polling or raise hand feature to vote for the best option.

Here are some problem solving scenarios for adults or kids to use in the game:

• Zombies attack and you have to find a place to hide.
• You are at the zoo and the animals escape. Which one do you try to corral back into the pen first?
• After waiting in line for hours, someone cuts in front of you last minute. The person appears to be visually and hearing impaired, and doesn’t notice your protests. An official announces that due to diminishing supply, this individual will be the last in line to be served.
• You are eating a meal with important clients and/or your partner’s parents, and you want to impress. The individuals make you a dish that does not fit within your dietary restrictions, but you do not speak the same language and cannot explain why you do not want to eat.
• An imposter has infiltrated the organization, who looks, speaks, and behaves exactly like you. How do you convince your peers that you are the original?

For similar dilemmas, check out this list of Would You Rather? questions.

16. Desert Island Survival

Desert Island Survival is a game that challenges players to prioritize. The premise is that players have been stranded on an island, and must decide what order to perform survival steps.

Here are the possible actions:

• Set up shelter
• Explore the island
• Try to signal for help
• Make weapons for self-defense
• Build a raft to escape the island
• Start a fire
• Choose a group leader
• Search for other survivors

All group members must agree on the order of the steps. Players should explain the reasoning for the order of each step while ranking the actions.

Another version of the game involves players receiving a list of 15 to 20 items, and selecting five or so to bring to the island. You can also vary the location of the game, substituting remote islands for destinations like outer space or the distant past.

17. Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure stories enable readers to determine the outcome of the story by making decisions. Each action has a consequence that takes the tale in a different direction. Participants can try to guess how the story may unfold by talking through the different choices. When completing the activity in a group setting, the majority of the team must agree on an action before moving forward in the story.

There are a few ways to facilitate these activities online:

• Play an online role playing video game
• Watch an interactive movie like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
• Read from a Choose Your Own Adventure book on Zoom
• Click through a Choose Your Own Adventure platform
• Create your own story using a Google Form

Whichever way you choose to do the exercise, you can use the screen share feature in your virtual meeting software so that listeners can more easily follow along.

18. MacGyver

MacGyver is a show where the hero escapes sticky situations by improvising tools out of unlikely materials. For example, in one episode the hero makes a telescope out of a newspaper, magnifying lens, and a watch crystal.

To play MacGyver, you can either list three to five objects participants can use, or challenge players to use items that are within arms reach.

Simply state a desired end result, such as “a way to open a locked door,” or “a getaway vehicle,” and then ask teams to explain what they will build and how they will build it. To make the activity more collaborative, you can give teams five or ten minutes in breakout rooms to strategize and design a prototype.

19. Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game where players pretend to be magical figures and creatures. One player serves as the dungeon master, who guides the game, while the other players pick characters and make decisions to move the story forward. Upon choosing a course of action, players roll a twenty-sided die to determine whether or not the plan succeeds. The game is story-based, the possibilities are nearly limitless, and truly creative problem solving options arise. Also, since gameplay is mostly verbal, Dungeons & Dragons is an easy activity to do over Zoom.

Here are the basic rules for Dungeons & Dragons .

20. Pandemic

Pandemic is a game that pits players against the forces of nature in a race to contain and control disease outbreaks. At the beginning of the game, each player receives a role such as containment specialist or operations expert. Participants must carry out the duties of their roles by choosing appropriate actions. Pandemic is a great game for groups because each team member has a clear part to play, and players must collaborate and work together instead of competing against each other.

To play the game online, you can use a Pandemic game app , or talk through the exercise while one attendee moves and displays pieces on the board.

Note: The subject of this game might hit too close to home for some players, considering recent history. You can find games with similar mechanics that deal with different subject matter, such as Forbidden Island.

Check out more team building board games .

21. Model UN

Model UN is one of the best virtual problem solving activities for students. This exercise casts participants in the role of international diplomats who must negotiate to solve realistic problems. Each player assumes the role of a country ambassador and must form alliances and propose solutions to solve crises.

Here are some sample Model UN scenarios:

• Human rights violation by powerful country
• Food shortage
• Disease epidemic
• Technology privacy violations
• Civil war branching into surrounding countries
• Natural disasters

Depending on the size of the group, participants either take on the part of an entire government of a country, or play a certain role within the government. To carry out the activity on Zoom, players can take turns giving speeches, message other countries privately via the chat, meet in breakout rooms to form alliances or have more intimate discussions, and use the polling feature to vote on propositions.

If politics does not resonate with your group, then you can alter the exercise by applying the same activity structure to a different theme, such as the Justice League, movie characters, business board members, or reality TV stars.

The main purpose of the exercise is to research, talk through problems, and compromise. As long as these elements are present, then the specifics of the setup do not matter.

There are many types of problem solving activities for adults. You can do online problem solving games, which require a different skill set than in-person problem solving. For instance, communication must be much clearer and more abundant when group members are far apart and unable to demonstrate or pick up physical cues.

Though many problem solving games include props and in-person elements, there are many games you can play together online. These exercises work well as educational tools as well as team bonding accelerators. Upon completion, participants are likely to feel a sense of accomplishment and increased confidence. These games are also great practice for real life conflict resolution, creative thinking and team building.

Next check out this list of connection games , this collection of crime-solving games , and this post with conflict resolution games .

We also have a list of the best decision making books and a list of team building problems for work .

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FAQ: Problem solving activities

Here are common answers to questions about group problem solving activities.

What are problem solving games?

Problem solving games are challenges that ask players to think critically and use logic to overcome issues or answer riddles. Examples include sudoku, murder mysteries, and spaghetti towers. These games are also known as “problem solving exercises”, “problem and solution games” and “group problem solving activities.”

What are the best problem solving games for groups?

The best problem solving games for groups include online escape rooms, moral challenges, and improv games.

What are some good problem solving team building activities for students?

Some good problem solving activities for students include crossword puzzles, choose your own adventure stories, and model UN.

How do you play problem solving games online?

The best way to play problem solving games online is to join a video call meeting to talk through the issue. Using the screen sharing and digital whiteboard features helps participants visualize the problem more clearly. Breakout rooms give teams the chance to discuss the issue more intimately.

Author: Angela Robinson

Marketing Coordinator at teambuilding.com. Angela has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and worked as a community manager with Yelp to plan events for businesses.

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The best puzzle games on PC

Stump yourself with the best puzzle games from our list of favorites.

Choosing the best puzzle games from decades of favorites seems like an impossible task, but it's one we've undertaken. Of all the revered PC game genres, puzzle games are among the most classic, but for this list of recommendations, we've haven't tried to rank the greatest puzzlers in the history of everything—just great, modern games we think you'll enjoy a lot right now.

2023 games : Upcoming releases Best PC games : All-time favorites Free PC games : Freebie fest Best FPSes : Finest gunplay Best MMOs : Massive worlds Best RPGs : Grand adventures

We've also narrowed our definition of 'puzzle game.' We hope you’ll find a game on this list that you haven’t played before, that’ll test your problem solving skills and ingenuity, and give you that fuzzy wave of relief and pride every time you have a breakthrough. And with that as our goal, we haven’t included games like Peggle, which aren't really puzzling , or Tetris, which wouldn’t be quite so challenging if time weren't an issue. We’re looking for more contemplative games here—you know, chin scratchers, brow furrowers, hair puller-outers, games that are going to stump you. We'll add to this list in the future, too, dropping in new games, or older ones if we revisit them and decide the ought to have a place here.

Release date: 2014 | Developer: State of Play | Steam Kami’s rules are simple: click on any pattern of contiguous squares of the same color to change them to another color of your choosing, and try to make the whole sheet the same color in as few moves as possible. The basic technique is to start by unifying the largest shapes, surrounding any odd colored islands, and then swapping the large area to match those isolated squares. The principle is straightforward, but identifying the most efficient path requires seeing several moves ahead, and after the tutorial puzzles it can take a lot of thought. It feels great when it clicks, and the way Kami’s rough sheets of colored paper magically fold themselves away is mesmerizing. The colors schemes are gorgeous, too, and the music is sweet and relaxing—it feels to us like an excellent companion for a mid-afternoon cup of coffee.

The only problem we have with Kami is the baffling inclusion of a daily hint limit. On mobile, you could pay for extra hints, but on PC, there are no microtransactions. So, if you run out of hints for the day, that’s it. And the hints are important. If a puzzle has us stumped, getting just the first move is really welcome, as it sets us on the right path without removing the sense of accomplishment entirely.

Kami made this list despite some unnecessary mobile baggage, though, because there's a workaround: if you run out of hints and really want another one, you can just set your system clock to another day.

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Thomas Bowker | Steam Lyne is another game we share with mobile, but worth a shout. It’s not the sort of game that stumps you, stopping you cold—it’s one for fiddling with until the solution appears. The basic problem is that you have a few shapes on the board which need to be connected. Your connective lines can’t intersect each other, and you can only connect shapes of the same type. You must connect every shape with its same-shape friends, and fill every ‘hub,’ each of which might need a different number of connections. The solutions are zig-zagging patterns of lines, perfectly avoiding each other and hitting all the notes they’re supposed to. It can be challenging, but never really frustrating, and it's a great way to zone out.

Release date: 2011 | Developer: Zachtronics | Steam SpaceChem is about making molecules, though you don’t need a graduate degree in chemistry to sort out its puzzles. That’s what’s so lovely about Zachtronics Industries’ games— TIS-100 , for instance, is about assembly language programming, but we’ve managed to get through a few puzzles and feel awfully clever without any experience in that area, either.

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Essentially, you’re creating an elemental circuit board, a set of instructions for building molecules. As in Infinifactory, the act of designing a system and then watching it work is the joy here. Eventually, though, SpaceChem does get hard, so approach it with patience and a willingness to learn.

The Swapper

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Facepalm Games | Steam The primary mechanic in The Swapper is the ability to create a few clones of your main character wherever your line of sight and clone-gun reach permits, which then allows you to ‘swap’ to that clone instantly. Clones mirror everything you do, regardless of where they’re located. Shoot one up to a high platform, take a few steps forward, and that clone will fall forty feet and hit the ground with a sickening crunch. Puzzles revolve around environmental obstacles (switches, light variables that prevent cloning or swapping, twitch clone-swapping) but your cloning tools never fundamentally change. What you’re allowed to do is there from the get go, and if you catch on early enough, there are huge sequences of the game you can skip earlier than normal.

Environments and objects themselves are based on actual clay models, so everything carries an uncanny, semi-realistic aesthetic, as if you could reach out and touch any of The Swapper’s decrepit space station environments. As if the gameplay wasn’t enough, the narrative wraps everything up in a mysterious and somewhat horrifying examination of what qualifies as a living person. Puzzle over life and death while you puzzle over puzzles.

Release date: 2009 | Developer: Number None | Steam Every world in Braid opens with a slightly tweaked version of the same ‘tutorial’ level. There’s a pit and no way for your little Mario-esque avatar to jump across. Initially, it feels insulting, a silly commentary on 2D platforming conventions and level design—nothing you typically see in those games is ever impossible. Otherwise, how would you finish the game? But Braid turns one genre into something else entirely by layering abstract rules and mechanics.

Each world operates by its own set of rules based on the passage of time. In one, you can just hold a button to reverse the flow. In another, whatever direction you walk in progresses or reverses the flow of that level’s timeline. They don’t necessarily get more complex, but more unique. Actual difficulty comes from the level designs themselves. Some puzzles will take hours from you, maybe days. They require time away, the solutions coming to you with a slap of the forehead, possibly while you're brushing your teeth or mid-conversation about the last ball game.

So, the pit and gap are no longer an impossibility. A ‘broken’ platforming level transforms into a simple puzzle, and opens up new avenues of thinking in a familiar framework.

The Incredible Machine 2

Release date: 1994 | Developer: Jeff Tunnell Productions | GOG In the opening sequence of Pee-wee Herman’s Big Adventure, the titular weirdo makes breakfast via an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. A sequence of bizarre, otherwise unrelated objects are made one—a candle burns a rope that drops an anvil and sends a ferris wheel spinning which—you get the idea. All this, just to crack an egg.

The Incredible Machine 2 (not to discount the first) harnessed both the absurdity and ingenuity of Goldberg machines, tasking the player with completing a fairly simple objective by very complex means. And there were plenty of means. You might just have to ‘get the tennis ball into the waste bin’ but you’re given a few treadmills, gears, a hamster on a wheel, a trampoline or two, and maybe a boxing glove to do it. There were ideal solutions each puzzle, but as the game opened up and allowed for use of more tools, the solutions became less prescribed and more up to player creativity. And even though the puzzles got hard very quick, failure was usually funny instead frustrating. It’s this, the open-ended and experimental nature of The Incredible Machine that makes it such a timeless puzzle game.

The Talos Principle

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Croteam | Steam Without the narrative dressing, The Talos Principle is still an amazing puzzle game. The majority of what you do is navigate a series of puzzle rooms, picking up and moving objects (boxes on switches, prisms that connect lasers and open doors, fans, and so on) in order to unlock doors or skirt by defenses in order to grab a tetromino piece, aka, the win condition. While the game introduces the varying tools over time, the whole of what you can accomplish with them is there from the start. As more tools are thrown into increasingly complex puzzles, it becomes a matter of experimentation and order of operations. What can a fan lift? When should the fan lift? How do I power the fan? Each puzzle feels impossible at first, but by the end, the machinations you discover and execute as a player feel so robust, complex, and smart that it’s hard not to feel like the last two hours of brickwalling were actually a breeze.

That The Talos Principle shares a writer with another game on the list, The Swapper, isn’t a surprise. They both deal with similar themes–consciousness, humanity, moral ambiguity—and wrap them around the gameplay in a way that doesn’t feel convoluted or forced. The Talos Principle’s plot is also really well written. It carries the same slow sense of growing uncertainty that Portal pulled off so well at first, and takes it to another level with genuinely smart philosophical, human, and breezy narrative tidbits. So, while you solve individual puzzles, you’re also puzzling out the nature of what you’re doing, and whether or not pursuing certain paths will have any effect at all on the game’s ending. It’s as mind-bendy as mind-benders get.

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Polytron Corporation | Steam Fez is a charming and oddly sad puzzle platformer, but at first glance not a particularly challenging one. Tasked with navigating a peaceful 2D world harried by the arrival of 3D, protagonist Gomez (he wears a Fez) must navigate 3D worlds from a 2D perspective. Sounds confusing! It is, but the simple act of playing the main game through to completion never gets too taxing. The real puzzles in Fez aren’t really required to finish the game, but their impenetrable, mysterious nature invites speculation. They’re puzzles of course, but the way they’re presented feels like archeology: deciphering the meaning in obtuse hieroglyphs and mysterious QR codes. It took the community months to understand how to solve some of these puzzles, and I’m fairly certain some remain uncracked. Play Fez for the beautiful world and breezy tone, stay for one of the toughest challenges hidden in a purportedly ‘easy’ game.

Hexcells Infinite

Release date: 2014 | Developer: Matthew Brown | Steam Hexcells is a slow, methodical game, because you’re penalized for wrong moves—sort of like advanced Minesweeper. The board is made up of, as you’d expect, hexagons. Some are part of the pattern you’re trying to create, and turn blue when you left click them. The rest are not, and when you reveal them as imposters by right-clicking, they show you how many adjacent hexes are part of the pattern. Some also give you extra information, such as whether or not the adjacent blue hexes are adjacent to each other or separated.

Hexcells is about considering simple bits of information and determining what hidden information they reveal. For instance, if an uncovered cell is adjacent to one blue cell, and a blue cell is already uncovered next to it, you can safely count out all the other cells touching it. Pretty simple for simple patterns, but it very quickly becomes tricky, like advanced Sudoku. The feeling when you clear a puzzle with no errors is one of relief more than victory, but it is really satisfying to sweep the board without a single misclick. This one isn’t for those who like to fiddle with a problem until they find a solution—Lyne or Infinifactory come to mind—but for those who like to make deliberate moves for a precision puzzling strike.

Antichamber

Release date: 2013 | Developer: Alexander Bruce | Steam Explaining Antichamber to people is difficult. It’s a stone cold first-person puzzle game, no doubt. There are definite rules in its stripped down corridors and cryptic rooms, they just take an entirely different perspective—sometimes literally—to understand. There’s no invasive narrative precedence to speak of, so the gameplay is reduced to exploration that hinges entirely on the player’s curiosity. You spend the majority of the game encountering strange architecture or tools attempting to decipher if they can be used to traverse through an environment or to clue you in on other rules in Antichamber’s world. Most conventions of how we understand physical space through the first-person perspective are twisted in subtle ways or thrown out completely. To explain how is to ruin the game completely.

Most surfaces, including objects, are white with black lines defining their features, but color gradients sway in and out of certain halls and rooms as if to evoke the intimate, troubling psychosis of our dear friend, MS Paint. The thing is, all the color has meaning. It, and nearly every visual, auditory, and tactile component feed into the game’s psychedelic logic. Learning this logic is only half the battle, the remainder is applying that logic to even more mind-bending puzzles. So, for example, once you learn that certain doors can only be opened if they cannot be seen, applying the same line of thinking to an increasingly complex series of puzzles turns from mental exercise to an exercise in integrity. The more you understand in Antichamber, the less you trust yourself.

World of Goo

Release date: 2008 | Developer: 2D BOY | Steam Like all the best puzzle games, World of Goo's core concept is simple: Use elastic, adhesive (and sentient) balls of goo to build structures that will enable them to climb up to a pipe, where they can be sucked up and delivered to the World of Goo corporate headquarters. It's easygoing at the start—build a tower, construct a bridge, nothing too complex—but quickly grows more difficult, and bizarre, in equal measures. Obstacles like whirling blades, spikes, and fire make life nasty and short for many a Goo Ball, and after awhile different species of Balls with unique characteristics will begin to appear. Balloon Goo floats, for instance, while Green Goo can be detached and reused, and Beauty Goo is huge, aggravating, and generally useless. And because everything is made of goo, everything you create is inherently unstable: The trick isn't to build solid structures, but to figure out how to let them sag and sway—because they're going to—without breaking into pieces.

But what elevates World of Goo from a good puzzler to a great game are the detail and flourishes that aren't necessary to the puzzles, but are absolutely indispensable to creating the marvelous world in which they exist. The squealing, bug-eyed Goo Balls are endearingly cute, and the light-hearted, sometimes cryptic messages left by the Sign Painter are entertaining in their own right. There's a story here too, believe it or not, and it actually gets a little dark, although it never entirely lets go of its inherent goofiness. Even the soundtrack, at the risk of overselling it, is sublime, and somehow a perfect match for a game about stretching sticky globs of grease into weird shapes. World of Goo is one of those games that belongs on just about every "games you should play" list, and it’s baffling that, years after its release, there's still no sign of a sequel.

Infinifactory

Release date: 2015 | Developer: Zachtronics | Steam Infinifactory is one of our highest-scored games of 2015, with Chris calling it his favorite puzzle game in years. Like SpaceChem, Infinifactory is a creative factory design game, though a bit more accessible. To please your alien captors, you’ve got to jetpack around a factory dropping blocks—conveyor belt blocks, for instance—to build a machine that will complete a set of goals. The simplest is to transport a component from a dispenser to the correct exit point, but as your tasks get more complicated, logic devices are introduced to increase the complexity of your designs along with them.

Infinifactory is all about satisfaction of building the most beautiful, efficient machine you can and watching it do its work. As Chris put it, “It's the videogame equivalent of those incredibly compulsive looping gifs of factory processes.” There’s also a dark, slapstick story threaded in, and some wonderful environments in later puzzles.

Portal and Portal 2

Release date: 2007, 2011 | Developer: Valve | Steam Portal was a success—a huge one—for a number of reasons. The writing, the humor, and the story that unexpectedly began to drip through the cracks of Aperture Science while we played Valve’s 2007 first-person puzzler. Thing is, it would still be a great game without any of that because the puzzle-solving is so damn great on its own. Escaping a series of test-chambers armed only with a gun that shoots space-warping portals is fun and rewarding. At the time it was also completely different from just about anything we’d seen in an FPS.

The basics are simple to grasp. After placing two portals in two different spots, walking into one portal lets you exit the other, no matter where it is. Each new puzzle chamber is more complex than the last, and soon you’re using portals to avoid turrets, fling yourself over floors of acid, activate buttons and redirect lasers. There are even some reflex and momentum-based puzzles which challenge you to place your portals as you’re sailing through the air. It culminates in an escape of sorts, a fascinating crawl behind the scenes of the facility where we get to put into practice everything we’ve learned. The difficulty increases gradually, getting more complex at just the right pace, so we never feel frustrated and yet it never seems too easy. There’s even a puzzle-based boss fight, and a charming little song when you win. While Portal 2 upped the ante in just about every department, the original is still a wonderful, funny, and rewarding way to spend a few hours. (And, to be clear, we also recommend Portal 2, especially for its co-op puzzles.)

Baba is You

Release date: 2019 | Developer: Hempuli Oy | Steam Baba Is You gets away with being so infuriatingly mind-bending by also being so dang cute. Baba (you) pushes around blocks of words to change the level environment and the conditions of the game itself. 

In one level you start as a rabbit in a walled room. Inside the room with you are three text blocks—“Wall”, “is”, and “stop”. They’re connected in a straight line so the walls currently stop your character from passing through them. If you nudge any of the blocks out of line the walls no longer stop you and you can walk through them. 

The blocks which make a win condition for the level aren’t yet connected in a line. The simplest solution to that is to push the blocks marked “flag”, “is” and “win” into a line. After that, walking to the flag will complete the level.

But there are other solutions which immediately start to show you how many possibilities the system involves. You could mix blocks from the first and second room to write “Wall is win”. That lets you finish the level by touching any of the walls. 

Although the difficulty curve between levels can feel a bit off-kilter depending on how you personally think about each puzzle, Baba Is You is incredibly versatile, allowing for a number of unorthodox solutions to each level.

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.

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23 Problem-solving games for busy work teams

Problem solving is a skill that can serve almost anyone, in any role, in any industry. The ability to think critically, and resolve issues is a welcome talent that is helpful for every organization. How can you encourage such thinking in your team? In this article, we are talking about our favorite problem-solving games, activities, and exercises for work. Use these activities to sharpen the reasoning and decision-making skills of your department or your entire company. Without further ado, let’s dive into the best problem solving games for getting the most of your next work event. 

In-person problem solving games

If you have the opportunity to get your team together in person, that’s a gift! Perhaps you are planning a company retreat or a department-wide in-person meeting. Whatever the circumstances, in today’s more digital workspace, it’s not always easy to have everyone in the same room. When you actually do, make the most of it! These activities are set up for in-person groups. They are part team-building activity, part icebreaker, and all fun! All of these activities are guaranteed to get people thinking, communicating, and having fun. If you have a particularly big group, you may want to browse our article on large group games too. 

1. Treasure hunt

Similar to a scavenger hunt, a treasure hunt is a lot of fun but with a bit more intention. Rather than collecting a random list of items, participants use clues to find more prompts and hints, until the group solves a mystery (or finds a treasure). You can also create a treasure map if you want to play into the “pirate” fantasy a little more. The important thing is that only clues point toward the next stop - areas of the map should not be spelled out, but involve some problem solving and critical thinking to figure out what the clue means. 

2. Story challenge

For the language lovers on your team, try this version of an ongoing story icebreaker. To play, each person receives a number of words (a word bank) that they can use to create a story. Then, everyone reads their piece out loud or presents it to the group. To come up with the words available for each person, you can use a random word generator online, or get creative. For example, consider instructing participants that they can only use words from the company website, or from the emails they received in their inbox yesterday. 

3. Moral dilemma

Similar to a “ would you rather ” game, this activity centers on ethical dilemmas. Players should try to flex their moral problem-solving muscles by tackling a social issue. For example, Scruples is a popular board game that can be played. Or, you can look online for versions of games like Dilemma or Quandary. This is a great way to learn more about your colleagues while getting a peek at the way they think. 

4. Build a shelter

How would you survive if you were stranded in an isolated place with a blizzard coming? Use this activity to find out! As an added complication, you can pretend that everyone is blinded by frostbite (by using blindfolds). The team leader must give the group instructions for building a shelter that can withstand the arctic winds. To play, you need a large space and some supplies. Then, select a leader (who can see) and blindfold everyone else. You’ll also need a large fan. The leader guides everyone in putting together their shelter (remember, while blindfolded). When everyone feels confident that their shelter is up to the test, turn on the fan and see if the structure can withstand the wind! This game is sure to lead to a lot of laughs and you’ll be surprised at some of the clever ideas that people come up with. This is also a powerful exercise for effective leadership - it’s not easy to reach a goal with a group that is blindfolded! Check out our article on team activities especially for leadership as well.

5. Improv games

You may think of improv games as more of an icebreaker activity, but the truth is there is a lot of brain power that goes into well-done improv. Look for ways to add both logic and entertainment to your next improv effort. Consider scenarios like banned words, where people cannot use a certain list of words, or “miracle cure”, where one person shares a problem they’re having and the other person must come up with the solution on the spot. Both are fun and easy ideas that don’t require anything but willing participants! If you need some other quick and easy team building activities , make sure to follow our blog. 

6. Spaghetti tower

In this classic team building game, users try to build a tower using uncooked pasta noodles and marshmallows. The instructions are simple: use the tools at your disposal to design and build the tallest tower in order to win the challenge. You can judge on height alone, or weigh other factors like innovation, number of towers, or stability. For more simple team building activities , make sure to follow our blog. 

7. What would you do?

Another classic icebreaker, this game involves coming up with some scenarios that require brain power to address. Here are some prompts you can use with your group: 

• What would you do if you were at the zoo and all the animals escaped? 
• What would you do if you were the first person to find out about an upcoming zombie apocalypse? 
• What would you do if you were in line for a really important item, and a person cut in front of you, getting the last item? 
• What would you do if you were invited for dinner at the home of someone you really needed to impress, and the food was terrible? 
• What would you do if an imposter that looks and acts just like you infiltrated your organization? How can you convince everyone that you’re the “real” you?

8. “MacGyver” challenge

MacGyver is an older television program where the hero escaped sticky situations by improvising tools made of unlikely materials. You can recreate this set-up in your event space or office. To play, challenge participants to use 3-5 items to reach a desired end result. For example, something like “a way to pick the door lock” or “escape vehicle” are fun options. You can either set out some various equipment, or have people collect their own based on what they can find around the office. Note: if you are doing this in a conference room or other rented space, it makes sense to have a table set up with random odds and ends for people to pick from. 

9. Egg drop challenge

This one will take you back to high school physics class! Break a larger group into smaller teams and challenge them to come up with a container that will protect an egg even when it’s dropped from up high. You can either let people know far enough in advance that they can discuss, design, and collect materials; or you can have supplies ready and have everyone build their creation on the spot. If you go that route, you’ll want to provide a variety of boxes, packing supplies, rubber bands, fabric, etc. Then set up a ladder and have each team drop their container and see if their egg remained intact. 

10. Shrinking circle

Adaptability and flexibility are huge in the business world. One way to focus on both of those items is by playing this simple and silly game. Start out by using a rope to create a large circle that everyone can fit in. Then, every few minutes, make the circle a bit smaller. Depending on how large the circle is in the first place, you can take away an inch or a foot each round. The challenge is for everyone present to stay inside the circle. This will require some serious innovation once the circle gets small, and lots of laughs almost always ensue. Note: People are likely to end up touching each other in this exercise. It’s difficult not to once the space gets small, like a game of Twister. You know your colleagues best - if that level of closeness would make anyone uncomfortable, it’s probably best to try a different exercise. 

Out-of-the-office problem-solving activities

Everyone once in a while, it can be really valuable to get out of your usual work environment and into a new mental space. If your team is planning a multi-day retreat, don’t be afraid to include an organized activity that will help everyone to think more critically. Most towns have at least one option for getting your group together and learning some new ways to problem solve. Do some research on what you have available locally, or work with an organization like Surf Office who can plan your next retreat - including the fun elements that your employees will be talking about for months to come! If you know that you can’t get out of the office right now, stick to this list of indoor team building activities . 

11. Escape room

The goal of an escape room is to follow a series of clues and take on some challenges in order to unlock the space that everyone is locked in. There are usually 5 - 10 puzzles that teams will work together to figure out. Typically finishing one leads to another clue, so that participants can move onto the next phase. Only when they’ve successfully completed all of the tasks can they find the key and escape. While you can definitely set up an escape room on your own, we think it’s worth finding a local version in your town (or wherever your retreat is taking place). These are professionally set up and usually in really cool spaces like an underground bunker or a historic building. An escape room is a good excuse to get out of the office and spend time with coworkers in a new environment. 

12. Murder mystery

These story-based games have people take on a role in a pretend scenario. They may take on a role like detective, dinner guest, or even killer in their dinner. Most of the time the games involve reading lines from a script, searching for clues, or even solving some simple challenges to move onto the next phase. Participants have to pay attention to conversations and context clues in order to get an understanding of who the killer might be. Observation and logic are key to catching the killer. Some murder mysteries involve getting dressed up and having a nice dinner, so if you’re looking for an idea for a big night out capping off your next retreat, this is perfect. 

13. Ax throwing

What do axes have to do with problem solving? You might be surprised. This is definitely an activity you’ll want to go to a professional venue for. Ax throwing outfits have everything you need, plus the right safety precautions. They have everything set up with the proper distances, buffers between throwing stations, safe ax materials, etc. Plus, many of them offer food and drinks! Ax throwing can help with problem solving because most people don’t excel at it their first time. It takes some practice and careful consideration to figure out where to stand, the best stance, the force of the throw, etc. As you take turns, you’ll make adjustments and also consider new methods based on observing your teammates. The more you watch and the more you try, the better you’ll get. In fact, instead of having people compete against each other, we suggest having the team compete against themselves, aiming for a higher total score in their second or third consecutive game. This activity allows you to observe others and then optimize - essentially learning from each other. 

14. Paper boat race

If you are able to visit a location by water, you can try this really fun activity. In this fun and creative exercise, participants build a small boat with paper (and other supplies) and then race them in a small body of water like a pond or stream. The boats are usually made by folding paper into a boat shape, but you can also try offering cardboard, balloons, popsicle sticks, or other crafty materials. You’ll also want to supply materials for decorating so that everyone can really have their creation stand out. Obviously the person who reaches the finish line first is the winner, but you can offer a few other prizes just for fun, like most beautiful boat or best effort. Make sure to check out our article on other creativity and innovation games , too. 

Problem-solving puzzles

When it’s just not possible to get everyone together, you can still encourage your team to put on their thinking caps and hone their skills. There are tons of critical thinking games, puzzles , and even apps that people can use to practice problem solving. You can encourage your team members to play these games in their spare time, or even set up a competition where people log minutes playing such games or using the apps. If you’re feeling really generous, give everyone a small stiped to be used on a problem solving app of their choice. This special touch makes a nice addition to a holiday gift, too!

Sudoku has become one of the most popular problem solving games for adults. There are dozens of free app options, as well as paperback books that you can pick up. The goal of this game is to fill each box on a 9×9 grid so that every row, column, and letter contains each number from one to nine. It sounds tricky - and it is - but players tend to find it addicting and the game has grown a huge following in recent years. Encourage people to play on their own by downloading an app or purchasing a puzzle book, or as a team by having the puzzles available in your office or at your next event. 

16. Crossword puzzles

These classic word games have players fill out words based on clues. Words interconnect, and people must think critically about the context clues of what they’ve filled out so far. These puzzles are super versatile and one of the best things about them is that you can make them yourself so they are themed. You can use an online crossword puzzle maker to create a custom puzzle with clues about your business or other relevant subjects. For your next event, it might be fun to have a custom crossword puzzle about your company history or trivia! 

17. Tic-tac-toe tournament

It sounds a little silly, but tic-tac-toe requires more brain power than one might think. Set up an ongoing tic-tac-toe board in your office and encourage people to use it on their breaks or when they have a few minutes to kill. You can set up a scoreboard and keep track of the leader; it’s a lot of fun to see the rankings change and to challenge the top performers. If you need an even simpler version of the same concept, simply set up the Connect Four game board in your break room and let people have at it! 

Problem-solving for virtual teams 

If your team is a bit scattered, it doesn’t mean that you can’t practice solving challenges together. In our digital world, there are plenty of options for online activities that teams can work on either independently or as a group. In the section above, we shared some ideas for independent work. These ideas are designed to bring your team together, no matter where they are. Set a time and have everyone hop onto your preferred communication tool, and then work together tackling these challenges. 

18. Virtual hackathon

A hackathon normally refers to an event where participants have a set amount of time to design and pitch a new product or solution. It’s normally used in the tech space for pitching things like new apps, but you can apply the concept in lots of other ways too. In this online version, teams work with each other using virtual meeting software and pitch ideas to a panel of judges. This type of event requires some advance notice for the participants, as they’ll want to collect a team and come up with some designs. If you want to raise the stakes, offer a prize for first place.

19. Online escape room

Just like an in-person escape room, in an online version people must solve a variety of puzzles in order to make it “out”. Digital escape rooms normally come in one of two ways: in a Zoom “room” led by a host, or in a choose-your-own-adventure style via Google Forms or other websites. To play virtually, staff will enter the meeting and follow the prompts they get, and it might involve screen sharing some Google tools to work on puzzles together. Because of the platforms and tools that may be involved, this activity is better for teams who are a bit more tech-savvy and comfortable with online meetings, apps, etc. 

20. Survival plans

Prioritizing is an important mental exercise. You can work on this with a game about survival. Have everyone imagine they are stranded on a desert island, and they must decide the correct order to perform life-saving steps in. Have this list handy, and ask everyone to pair off or get in small groups and number the list according to the best likelihood of survival: 

• Set up shelter
• Look around the island
• Signal for help
• Create weapons for self-defense
• Build a raft for water
• Start a fire
• Select a group leader
• Find other survivors
• Anything else you think of! 

The catch is that everyone must agree on the order of events!  That will typically involve discussion and coming to some sort of consensus. Once everyone is done with the exercise, have them present to the larger group and explain their reasoning. This exercise is good for team-building, communication, and problem resolution. Plus, you will be better prepared if you ever get stuck on a deserted island! 

21. Online role-playing games (like Dungeons and Dragons)

Seeing how people react in real-world situations is a really interesting way to get to know them better. Find an online game that has real-world actions and consequences, like Dungeons and Dragons. Or, you can make things even simpler by hopping on a Zoom together and reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book aloud, with the reader getting group consensus before making a decision. The important part is the discussion that will occur before choosing the next action. This is helpful for bonding and also helps you to see how your colleagues tick. These activities can be difficult to organize for big groups, so if you have a substantial team, try some of these team building activities for large groups instead. 

22. Google Docs story

Similar to an ongoing story icebreaker, this game is easy to do online as people have time. You start by creating a Google Doc that everyone on the team has access to. Then, have people go into the Doc and add to the story that’s developing. If you want, you can pick a prompt to kick things off - or you can just let the first person get creative and go for it! The more specific or bizarre the scenario, the more creative and clever people will have to get to add their portion. 

23. Model UN

Chances are you might be familiar with this concept from high school. Fortunately, adults can have a lot of fun with it too. You can play this virtually as long as everyone is a strong communicator. Each participant should take on the role of an international diplomat, and work together to form alliances and solve crises. Come up with a potential scenario that the UN must work through. Consider things like a global food shortage, natural disaster, or cyber-security threats. If your group is particularly large, you can have multiple people assigned to a country and they will have separate roles. If politics is a sensitive topic on your team, you might want to tweak this exercise to be focused on a business and treat participants like board members - or even a musical group! 

Set the tone of your next company retreat

These problem solving games and activities are great virtually any time - there is something for everyone, whether you’re remote or in person, on a large team or a small one. One of the best ways to implement a problem solving exercise is at the beginning of a team retreat. If you have organized a large meeting or team building event, consider getting things started with such an activity. Many of these problem solving games will get everyone thinking and make people more comfortable, plus a lot of them also serve as a form of icebreaker.

The next time you plan a work retreat , consider including a few of these on the agenda to set the tone for a fun, energizing event. Need help ensuring that your retreat is, in fact, fun and energizing?

Let Surf Office help ! We can help with organizing your next team retreat or all-company meeting so that you can focus on the fun.

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• 45 team building games to improve commu ...

45 team building games to improve communication and camaraderie

Team building games bring everyone together without the added pressure of work. Here, we’ve listed 45 of the top team building activities broken down by icebreaker, problem solving, indoor, and outdoor games.

As Ashley Frabasilio, Employee Engagement Manager at Asana puts it, “Creating a shared experience for teams to build relationships is one of the best ways to increase trust and encourage collaboration."

Whether you’re looking for indoor or outdoor activities, quick icebreaker games, or activities to bond with your remote team members, we compiled a list of over 45 team building games that you’ll actually enjoy. 

How to make team building inclusive

Teams with an inclusive culture tend to be more transparent, supportive, and happy because everyone feels accepted. It’s essential to make any team activity feel productive and enjoyable for the entire group, regardless of personalities or skill sets. Whether you’re working on building an inclusive remote culture or want in-person teams to feel more comfortable together, consider the following for an inclusive team building experience:

Inclusive team building means including everyone. Depending on the type of team building activity, you may benefit from hiring an outside expert to facilitate a team building event that everyone can participate in. Plus, the activity may feel more authentic because a professional is guiding you.

If you have introverts on the team, they may not be as excited about an exercise that involves lots of social interaction and do better in small groups. 

Teammates with speech, sight, or hearing impairments may feel left out during a game that involves blindfolding players and communicating without looking at each other.

Physically active games could exclude physically impaired teammates. 

Before choosing one of the team building games from this list, take stock of everyone's abilities. Find an activity that everyone on your team can participate in. Maybe even send out an anonymous poll to see what kinds of activities your team would be willing to partake in. Ultimately, the best team building activity will be the one that everyone can enjoy.

Team icebreaker games

Icebreaker questions and activities are the perfect “getting to know you” games but they’re also fun to play with teammates you’ve known for a long time. You can play them to get everyone up to speed for a meeting (especially on those 8am calls) or use them to introduce new team members.

1. Two truths, one lie

Team size : 3+ people

Time : 2–3 minutes per person

How to play : Ask everyone in the group to come up with two facts about themselves and one lie. The more memorable the facts (e.g., I went skydiving in Costa Rica) and the more believable the lies (e.g., I have two dogs), the more fun the game will be! Then, ask each team member to present their three statements and have the group vote on which one they think is the lie.

Why this exercise is great : This game is perfect for groups who don’t know each other well yet. The details you share can be used as building blocks for late conversations (“What else did you do in Costa Rica?”) to give you a better idea of who you’re working with.

2. Penny for your thoughts

Team size : 5+ people

How to play : You’ll need a box full of pennies (or other coins) with years only as old as your youngest team member (not the time to brag about your 1937 collector’s penny). Ask every team member to draw a coin from the box and share a story, memory, or otherwise significant thing that happened to them that year. This can be anything from learning how to ride a bike to landing your first job.    

Why this exercise is great : This is a fun twist on a stress-free and simple icebreaker that gives everyone the chance to share a personal story with their team. You can play multiple rounds if the stories are on the shorter side or let team members elaborate on their stories to gain deeper insight into their lives.

3. Mood pictures

How to play : Prepare a variety of images before you play. You can collect newspaper clippings, magazine cutouts, postcards, and posters or print out different images from the internet (Pinterest is a great spot). The images should show landscapes, cities, people, shapes, or animals in a variety of colors and perspectives.

Lay all the images out and ask team members to each pick one that resonates with their current mood. Once everyone has picked an image, ask them to share what they resonated with, how it makes them feel, and why they picked it.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise is a great way to get a meeting or a workshop started because it allows you to get a feel of the room in a creative and unexpected way. You don’t always have to ask your team to pick an image that reflects their mood—it can also be their expectations for a workshop, their feelings about a current project, or how they hope to feel at the end of the day. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, so this exercise makes talking about feelings easier for a lot of people.

4. One word exercise

Time : 5–10 minutes 

How to play : Pick a phrase related to the meeting topic and ask everyone to write down one word that comes to mind on a post-it. Then, gather these words on a whiteboard or put them in a presentation. For example, if you’re hosting a meeting about your annual holiday event. Everyone would take a moment to respond with the first word that comes in their head. If the team is responding with words like stress or exhaustion, you might want to rethink your process.

Why this exercise is great : This is a way to collect opinions, thoughts, or feelings about a meeting that’s well within most people’s comfort zone. You’ll have the chance to read the room before diving into the topic and may uncover some concerns or questions to focus on, which will make the meeting more beneficial to everyone.

5. Back-to-back drawing

Team siz e: 4+ people 

Time : 5–10 minutes

How to play : Split your team into groups of two and make them sit back to back. Hand one person a pen and piece of paper and show the other person a picture of something that’s fairly simple to draw (e.g., a car, a flower, a house). This person now has to describe the picture to their teammate without actually saying what the item is so they can draw it. They’re allowed to describe shapes, sizes, and textures but can’t say, “Draw a lily.” Once the blind drawing is finished, compare it with the original to see how well you communicated.

Why this exercise is great : This activity is a fun way to polish your communication skills, especially your listening skills. It also gives your team a chance to get creative and innovative by thinking outside the box to describe the image to their teammate.

6. Birthday line up

Team size : 8+ people

Time : 10–15 minutes

How to play : Ask your entire team to form a line in order of their birthdays without talking to each other. You can encourage other forms of communication like sign language, gestures, or nudges. If you want to add a little bit of pressure and excitement to the exercise, add a time limit! 

Why this exercise is great : Besides learning everyone’s birthday (which can always come in handy as a conversation starter later on), this exercise encourages your team to learn to communicate towards a common goal without using words. Although this can be a challenge and get frustrating, this exercise promotes problem framing skills, cooperation, and non-verbal communication skills.

7. Charades

Team size : 8–10 people

Time : 10–25 minutes

How to play : Divide your team into groups of four or five people. The person who goes first is given or shown a random object (e.g., printer, stapler, keyboard) in private. They then have to demonstrate how to use the object without actually showing it in front of their team. Their team gets 30 seconds on the clock to shout out the correct word (you can adjust the time depending on the difficulty of the objects).

Then it’s the other team’s turn. You’ll keep playing until every team member has had the chance to demonstrate an object to their team. 

Why this exercise is great : This classic game is a nice way to break up a mentally taxing day and get your team to do a creative exercise that isn’t work-related.

8. Swift swap

Team size : 10–20 people

How to play :  Split your team into two groups and line them up facing each other. Team A gets a quick observation period (15–30 seconds) in which group members have to memorize as many things about the people in front of them as possible. Then team A turns around while team B changes as many things about their appearance as possible. 

Anything from changing the line up order to swapping shoes with someone or changing your hairdo is fair game. After about 45 seconds, team A turns back around and gets 5–10 minutes to find out what’s changed. You can adjust the time depending on the size of your group.

Why this exercise is great : This game is a great way to break up a long day and take everyone’s minds off work for a little while. Your team also gets to practice time-sensitive non-verbal communication during the swapping phase.

9. Code of conduct

Time : 20–30 minutes

How to play : This game is a great way to tune into a new project or workshop. Write the two categories “meaningful” and “enjoyable” on a whiteboard and ask the group to share what they believe is needed to accomplish these two things for your project or workshop. This can be anything from “regular breaks'' to “transparency and honesty,” which could fall under either category.

Everyone will choose ideas that they agree are both meaningful and enjoyable . Record these values in a shared tool to establish the code of conduct for your upcoming project or workshop. This list will function as a reminder for the team to uphold these values.

Why this exercise is great : Whether it’s the first day of a workshop, the beginning of a new project, or simply a Monday morning, this exercise is great to get everyone on your team on the same page. By establishing group norms and values early on and holding everyone accountable with a written code of conduct, you can create a sense of cohesiveness. If you’d like to do this exercise virtually, use our team brainstorming template to collect everyone’s thoughts.

10. Common thread

Team size : 10+ people

Time : 30 minutes

How to play : Divide your team into groups of three to five people. Then ask your team to find things everyone in their group has in common. This can be a favorite TV show, an ice cream flavor nobody likes, or a common hobby. Encourage your teammates to find common threads that aren’t too superficial or obvious. The more things they can find that everyone in the group has in common, the better! If you have the time, bring everyone together afterward and ask the teams to share their experiences.

Why this exercise is great : This fun game allows your team to find commonalities that they may not get a chance to discover otherwise. It’s also a great way to reunite teams that feel a bit divided. Talking about shared likes and dislikes can be helpful to reconnect you with teammates.

Remote or virtual team building games

Bonding with your teammates can be more difficult when you’re working remotely. Remote or virtual team building games can improve remote collaboration , motivate teams , and create a sense of community even though you’re physically apart. You can use Zoom to connect with your teammates or do quick team building exercises via your remote work software during the day.

If your team is located across multiple time zones, you may have to get creative with scheduling. Ashley Frabasilio, Employee Engagement Manager at Asana encourages leaders to schedule these activities during normal work hours. Ensure that the activity is appropriate for all participants in all time zones so no one feels excluded. Using work hours for these exercises can also increase the participation rate because you’re not interfering with personal time.

11. Show and tell  

How to play : Ask everyone in your team to bring something they’re proud of or that brings them joy to your next meeting. This can be anything from a pet to a plant, a painting they did, or a certificate they received. Everyone gets two to three minutes to show off their item and answer questions from the team if they have any.

Why this exercise is great : Show and tell isn’t just fun for kids, it’s also a great way to connect with your team. You’re probably going to learn something new about your teammates and may get a couple of conversation starters for your next meeting from this game.

12. Photo caption contest 

How to play : Collect a few funny photos—for example a few memes that have recently been circling the internet. Send these to your team before the meeting and ask everyone to submit their best photo caption for each image. You can put these together in a quick presentation and present them to your team during the call. You can have a good laugh together and even vote for the best captions.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise is a fun way to get creative as a team and have a good laugh together.

13. Morning coffee 

Time : 15–30 minutes

How to play : Schedule regular coffee calls for your remote team to give everyone a chance to get to know each other like they would in an office setting. You can schedule team calls with four to five people or randomly assign two people to each other that switch every time. You can offer these casual calls once a week, bi-weekly, or once a month, depending on your team size and the interest in this opportunity. 

Why this exercise is great : Remote teams don’t often get a chance to just chit-chat and get to know each other without talking about work or feeling like they’re wasting meeting time. By designating 15–30 minutes on a regular basis to a casual call, your team members will have a chance to bond with people they might not typically interact with.

14. Lunch and learn

How to play : Hold a weekly or monthly “lunch and learn” where one team member presents a topic to the whole team during their lunch break. This presentation can be on a tool everyone uses at work, on a lesson learned from a recent project, or even on a book they read that everyone can learn from. 

Why this exercise is great : These events are a great opportunity for your team to connect in a more casual yet educational setting. If your team budget allows, send restaurant gift cards to your team members so they can order lunch for the call.

15. Online group game  

Time : 30–60 minutes

How to play : Invite your team to play a game online together. This can be an actual video game if everyone happens to use the same console at home or you can download an interactive game (like Jackbox ) which you can screen share with the rest of the group. 

Why this exercise is great : Playing a video game or an interactive game that has nothing to do with work can be a fun way to switch things up, create a more casual work environment, and get to know each other better. It will also give people with great sportsmanship a chance to shine!

16. Trivia games 

Team size : 6–20 people

Time : 30–90 minutes

How to play : Start a meeting with a quick game of trivia or host a regular virtual trivia night at the end of the work day. You can play a game of office trivia (e.g., facts about the company) or pick random other themes like TV shows, music, or national parks. To mix things up, ask other team members to host trivia night.

Why this exercise is great : Whether you’re making the trivia game office-themed or creating a regular team activity that takes everyone’s minds off of work, you’ll get to spend time with your team playing a competitive, educational, and entertaining game that gives everyone a chance to bond.

17. Quarterly challenge  

Time : One month

How to play : Create an optional challenge for your team to participate in. The challenge can be centered around healthy eating, meditation, journaling, or reading. Create a chat or thread where your teammates can exchange their experiences, wins, and questions to keep each other motivated and accountable throughout the month. 

Make sure your team knows that participation is optional. It never hurts to ask for feedback to spark future team challenge ideas.

Why this exercise is great : Creating a challenge like this for your team shows them that you care about their work-life balance. By offering a quarterly challenge, you provide your team with the opportunity to share an experience together. Plus, it’s always easier to complete a challenge when you have a team who supports you and an incentive to work toward.  

18. Personality test  

How to play : Send a personality test to your team and ask everyone to share their results in a chat or during your next team meeting. This can be a formal test like the Enneagram or StrengthsFinder . For something more lighthearted, you can send a fun quiz like the Sorting Hat to find out which Hogwarts house you belong in or a Buzzfeed quiz (e.g., “ What Kitchen Appliance Are You? ”).

Why this exercise is great : Depending on the type of quiz your team takes, this can become a funny icebreaker before you start a meeting or turn into a discussion on your team’s combined strengths and challenges. 

Problem solving games

Playing problem solving games with your team helps them level up their teamwork skills, resolve issues, achieve goals, and excel together. Whether you’re using new brainstorming techniques or going out for a team adventure, these fun team building activities are the perfect way to improve your team's problem solving skills.

19. Your first idea

Team size : 5–12 people

Time : 10–20 minutes

How to play : Ask everyone in your team to write down the first idea that pops into their head when they’re presented with the problem. Compile the list and review it as a team.

A fun twist on this game is to ask everyone to write down their worst idea. After reviewing with the team, you may realize that some ideas aren’t that bad after all. You can play this game with a real-life problem, a fictional one, or when you’re brainstorming new ideas to pitch.

Why this exercise is great : We often get too much into our heads about problems and solutions. By writing down the first solution that comes to mind, we can uncover new perspectives and fixes.

20. Back of the napkin

Team size : 6–24 people

Time : 15–20 minutes

How to play : Divide your team into groups of two to four and present them with a variety of open-ended problems. These can be work-related, imaginary, or even environmental problems. Every team gets a napkin and pen that they have to sketch or write their solution on after they’ve discussed the issue as a group. These will then be presented to the rest of the team.

Why this exercise is great : Some of the best ideas have allegedly been recorded on napkins (hey, when creativity strikes you’ll write on anything). This game imitates this scenario while challenging your team to collaborate on solving a creative problem.

21. Create your own

How to play : Each team member will create an original problem-solving activity on their own and present it to the group. Whether this entails a physical, mental, or creative challenge is up to your team. If you have the time, play some of the games afterward!

Why this exercise is great : Coming up with your own games is fun and a real creative challenge. It also allows your team members to showcase their strengths by creating challenges they’ll be prepared to tackle.

22. Spectrum mapping

Team size : 5–15 people

How to play : Present your team with a few topics that you’d like their opinions and insight on. Write them down on a whiteboard and give everyone sticky notes and pens. Ask them to write down their thoughts and pin them on the whiteboard underneath the respective topic.

Now arrange the sticky notes as a team. Try to group similar ideas together to the left of the topic and post outliers toward the right side. This will create a spectrum of popular thoughts and opinions on the left and more extreme ideas on the right.

Why this exercise is great : This game will help you map out the diversity of perspectives your team has on different topics. Remember that unpopular opinions don’t have to be wrong. Embracing this diversity can help you uncover new perspectives and innovative ideas to solve problems you’re facing as a team. 

23. What would “X” do? 

Team size : 5–10 people

Time : 45–60 minutes

How to play : Present your team with a problem and ask everyone to come up with a famous person or leader they admire. This can be a celebrity, a business person, or a relative. Challenge your teammates to approach the problem as if they were that person and present their solution (extra points for playing in character).

Why this exercise is great : Getting stuck in your own head can often keep you from solving a problem efficiently and effectively. By stepping into the shoes of someone else, you may uncover new solutions. Plus, it’s fun pretending to be someone else for a little while!

24. Team pursuit

Time : 1–3 hours

How to play : Form groups of two to six people that will compete against one another in a series of challenges. You can buy a team pursuit package online or create your own game, which will take a good amount of prep time. 

You’ll want to create a set of challenges for your team: cerebral challenges that test logic and intelligence, skill challenges like aptitude tests, and mystery challenges which usually ask for creativity and out-of-the-box thinking (e.g., come up with a unique handshake, take a fun picture, etc.).  

Why this exercise is great : A solid game of team pursuit will create a fun challenge that gives everyone a chance to shine and show off their talents. Whether you’re a good runner, a quick thinker, or a creative mind, everyone will be able to contribute to the success of the team. This game will bring your team closer together and show them new sides of their teammates that they may not have been aware of.

25. Code break

Team size : 8–24 people

How to play : This brain teaser is a fun activity that you can play indoors or outdoors to challenge your team. Outback Team Building offers self-hosted, remote-hosted, and on-site hosted events that include several codes your teammates have to find and break to make it through the course.

Why this exercise is great : This challenge requires creative thinking, creates a competitive environment, and works with large groups because you can break off into smaller groups.

26. Escape room

Time : 2–3 hours

How to play : Visiting an escape room is always a unique experience and a great way to spend an afternoon with your team. If you have multiple escape rooms nearby, ask your team if they have a general idea of what theme they’d like to explore (e.g., history, horror, sci-fi) and try to pick something you’ll think everyone will enjoy.

If you’re super creative and have the time and resources, you can put together an escape room on your own!

Why this exercise is great : Solving the mysteries of an escape room with your team will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your teammates, foster communication and collaboration, build trust, and become a shared memory that connects you together.

Indoor team building games

Most of these indoor games can be played in an office, conference room, or a hallway with a small team, but you may need a bit more space if you’re inviting a larger group to join in.

27. Perfect square

Team size : 4–12 people

How to play : Divide your team into groups of four to six and ask them to stand in a tight circle with their group. Ask everyone to blindfold themselves or close their eyes and give one person a rope. Without looking at what they're doing, the teams now have to pass the rope around so everyone holds a piece of it and then form a perfect square. Once the team is sure their square is perfect, they can lay the rope down on the floor, take off their blindfolds (or open their eyes) and see how well they did. 

Why this exercise is great : This game is about more than perfect geometric shapes, it’s an amazing listening and communication exercise. Because no one can see what they're doing, your team members have to communicate clearly while figuring out how to create a square out of a rope. Besides, it’s often really funny to see how imperfect the squares come out.

28. Memory wall

How to play : You’ll need a whiteboard and sticky notes for this game. Write different work-related themes on the whiteboard such as “first day at work,” “team celebration,” and “work travel.” Hand each teammate a few sticky notes and ask them to write down their favorite memories or accomplishments associated with one or more of these themes. Invite everyone to share these with the team to take a walk down memory lane and post the notes on the whiteboard as you go.

Why this exercise is great : This is a nice way to end a week, long day, or workshop because you’ll share positive experiences with one another that will leave your teammates smiling. If you’re finishing up a work trip or multi-day workshop, you can also do a slimmed-down version of this by asking everyone to share their favorite memory or biggest accomplishment of the last few days.

29. Turn back time  

How to play : This team building exercise works best in a quiet atmosphere with everyone sitting in a circle. Ask your team to silently think of a unique memory in their lives. You can give them a few minutes to collect their thoughts. Then, ask everyone to share the one memory they’d like to relive if they could turn back time.

Not everyone may be comfortable opening up at first, so be sure to lead with vulnerability and make everyone in the room feel safe about sharing their moment.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise is a great way to help your team members remember their priorities and bond on a deeper level. In a team that’s facing disconnection or stress, sharing personal highlights that aren’t work-related can help create a sense of togetherness. Although the exercise doesn’t take too long, it’s best to do it toward the end of the day so your team has a chance to reflect on what’s been said.

30. Paper plane  

Team size : 6–12 people

How to play : Split your team into groups of two to four and hand out card stock. Give each team 10–15 minutes to come up with the best long-distance paper plane design (they’re allowed to do research on their phones or computers) and a name for their airline.

When the paper planes are done, have a competition in a long hallway or outside to see which plane flies the farthest. 

Why this exercise is great : This exercise requires team members to collaborate on a project with a tight timeline. It is a great activity to practice communication skills, delegation, and time management.

31. Build a tower

Team size : 8–16 people

How to play : Divide your team into groups of four or five and provide them with 20 sticks of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. Challenge each team to build the tallest tower possible using only the supplies you gave them. When finished, the tower has to support the marshmallow sitting on top. Set the timer for 20 minutes and ask everyone to step away from their masterpiece when it runs out so you can crown a winner.

Why this exercise is great : This challenge is a great way to improve problem solving skills and communication within your team. Your team members will have to prototype, build, and present the tower in a short amount of time, which can be stressful. The better they work together, the more likely they are to succeed.

32. Flip it over

Team size : 6–8 people

How to play : Lay a towel, blanket, or sheet on the floor and ask your teammates to stand on it. The goal is to flip the piece over without ever stepping off of it or touching the ground outside of the fabric. You can make the challenge more difficult by adding more people to the team or using a smaller sheet.

Why this exercise is great : This exercise requires clear communication, cooperation, and a good sense of humor. It’s a great way to find out how well your teammates cooperate when presented with an oddly difficult task.

33. Sneak a peek 

Team size : 4–20 people

How to play : Create a structure out of Lego pieces and hide it in a separate room. Divide your team into groups of two to four people and give them enough Legos to replicate the structure in 30 minutes or less.

One player per team is allowed to sneak a peek at the original structure for 15 seconds, then run back and describe it to their team. The person who gets to sneak a peek rotates so everyone gets to see the original at some point during the game. The team that first completes the structure as close to the original wins! 

Why this exercise is great : During this game your team gets to focus on teamwork and communication. Since only one person at a time is allowed to look at the original, team members may see and describe different things. The more complex the structure is, the harder this game will be.

34. Pyramids

How to play : Pick a large open area for this game like a hallway, a meeting room, or the cafeteria. Divide your team into groups of four to six and give each team 10 paper cups. Ask the teams to stand in a line with about 8–10 feet between the team members. Now it’s a race against time!

The first person in each line has to build a pyramid with four cups at the base. Once they’re done, the second player has to help them carry the pyramid to their station (this can be on the floor or at a table). They can slide it on the floor or carry it together but if the pyramid falls apart, the players have to reassemble it on the spot before continuing their journey. At the next station, the second player has to topple the pyramid and rebuild it before the third player gets to help them carry it to the next station. This continues until the pyramid reaches the last station. The team that finishes first wins the game

Why this exercise is great : This game is fun to play during a mid-day break, fosters communication skills, and promotes teamwork.

35. Shipwrecked

Team size : 8–25 people

How to play : The premise of the game is that you’re stranded on a deserted island and only have 25 minutes to secure survival items off the sinking ship. Place items like water bottles, matches, food, etc., in the “shipwreck area.” You can also print pictures on index cards to make things a bit easier. The quantity of each item should be limited, with some items having more than others (e.g., more water than food, fewer tarps than teams, more knives than ropes, etc.).

Divide your team into groups of two (or more if it’s a large team). Once the clock starts, they have to gather as many items as they deem worthy from the shipwreck and rank them in order of importance. Since the items are limited (some more than others), the teams will not only have to prioritize the items within their own group of people but also negotiate, trade, and exchange items with other teams. 

Why this exercise is great : This game will challenge problem-solving abilities, encourage collaboration, and enable your team to flex their leadership skills. Typically, teams with strong leadership qualities will have the most success in making these quick decisions.

36. Team flag

Time : 30–45 minutes

How to play : Divide your team into groups of two to four people and provide them with paper and pens. Each group now has to come up with an emblem or flag that represents their team. Once everyone has completed their masterpiece, they have to present it to the rest of the teams, explaining how they came up with the design. This exercise is also a great opportunity to discuss how each group identified their common values and created alignment during the design process.

Why this exercise is great : This is a great way to get the creative juices flowing. Your team will not only have to come up with a unique design that represents their collective identity but they’ll also have to collaborate on putting pen to paper and presenting their flag or emblem at the end of the game.

37. Salt and pepper  

How to play : You’ll need a list of things that go well together like salt and pepper, left sock and right sock, day and night, peanut butter and jelly, or yin and yang. Write these words on individual pieces of paper and tape one sheet of paper on every team member's back. 

Ask your team to mingle and find out what’s written on their back by asking questions that can only be answered with yes or no (e.g., “Am I sweet? Do you wear me? Am I cold?”). Once the participants find out who they are, they have to find their match!

Why this exercise is great : Your team can use this game to bond with one another and improve their communication skills. If you have a large team, this exercise also gives them a chance to interact with people they may not usually get to talk to.

38. Sell it

Time : 45–90 minutes

How to play : Ask your teammates to each bring a random object to the meeting. Everyone then has to come up with a logo, slogan, and marketing plan to sell this object. After 30 minutes, each team member has to present their new product to the rest of the team. If you have a larger team, divide them into groups of 2–4 people and ask them to collaborate on their product pitch.

Why this exercise is great : This game is great to switch things up if you don’t already work in marketing or sales. It’s also fun to play with others as it allows your team to get creative and have fun with everyday objects.

39. The barter puzzle

Time : 1–2 hours

How to play : Divide your team into groups of three or four people and give each a different jigsaw puzzle of the same difficulty level. Ask them to complete the puzzle as a team. The twist: each puzzle is missing a few pieces that are mixed in with an opposing team’s puzzle. The teams have to figure out ways to get the pieces they need from the other teams by negotiating, trading pieces, or even exchanging teammates. Every decision has to be made as a team. The first team to complete their puzzle wins.

Why this exercise is great : Every decision made will have to be a group decision which challenges your team to improve their problem solving skills.  

Outdoor team building exercises

If you want to get a larger group together for a team building exercise, why not take things outside? Outdoor team building is also a great way to get your teammates to interact without the distractions of screens or smartphones. Whether you want to catch a breath of fresh air or get some sunshine together, these exercises will help you bond with your teammates outside of the office.

40. The minefield

Team size : 4–10 people

How to play : Create a minefield in a parking lot or another large, open space by sporadically placing objects like papers, balls, cones, and bottles. Split your team into groups of two and ask one person to put on a blindfold. The other person now has to guide the blindfolded teammate through the minefield only using their words. The blindfolded person is not allowed to talk and will be eliminated if they stop walking or step on anything in the minefield. 

The objective of the game is to make it to the other side of the minefield. The teams can then switch so another person will be blindfolded and guided through the field on their way back. You can also distribute pieces the blindfolded person has to pick up on their way through the field to add another difficulty level.

Why this exercise is great : This game is not just a trust exercise for your teammates but also a fun way to practice active listening skills and clear communication.

41. Earth-ball  

Team size : 5–20 people

Time : 15–45 minutes

How to play : You’ll need a balloon, beach ball, or volleyball for this activity. Ask your team to stand in a circle and keep the balloon or ball in the air for as long as possible. To make it a real challenge, no one can touch the ball twice in a row. The bigger your team, the more fun this game will be!

Why this exercise is great : This fun challenge is a great way to get your team moving. If you’re struggling to keep the ball up for longer, try to come up with a strategy to improve your time.

42. Scavenger hunt

How to play : Put together a scavenger hunt for your team. This can be in the form of a list of photographs they have to take (e.g., something red, all teammates in front of the company logo, the CEO’s car, etc.), items they have to collect (e.g., company brochure, yellow sticky note with manager’s signature on it, ketchup packet from the cafeteria, etc.), or other activities they have to complete on a designated route. 

Why this exercise is great : The more people that tag along, the more fun this game will be. You can group people together who don’t know each other very well to allow them time to bond during this exercise. Try to come up with company-specific quests for your team so they learn a few fun facts along the way. You can offer prizes for the most creative team or the first to finish the challenge to boost motivation.

43. Egg drop 

Time : 60–90 minutes

How to play : Divide your team into groups of two or three people and give each team a raw egg (keep some extras in case they break before the grand finale). Then put out supplies like tape, straws, rubber bands, newspapers, and balloons so the teams can build a structure for the raw egg that will protect it from a fall out of a second or third story window. 

Each team has 60 minutes to complete their structure. When the time is up, ask your teams to gather their eggs and egg cages to drop them out of the window. This grand finale will reveal which team engineered and built the best cage.

Why this exercise is great : Collaborating on a design and building a cage will challenge your team’s problem solving and collaboration skills.

44. Team outing

Team size : Any

How to play : Plan an outing for your team. You could attend a cooking class or go to a museum together. If you want to have something your teammates can work toward, plan to run a 5K together or host a ping pong tournament. You can also do something more casual like inviting your team to hangout at a bowling alley after work where you can play a few games in a casual and fun setting.

Why this exercise is great : Taking your team somewhere new will help break down some of the walls we often build in a professional setting. While you’re still at a company function, you’re more inclined to connect through casual conversation at a restaurant or park than you would at the office.

45. Volunteer as a team

How to play : Organize a team event during your regularly scheduled workday. This can be a charity event, yard sale, or fundraiser for a cause your team cares about. Even though these are enjoyable, scheduling them during work hours makes this feel like more of a perk than an obligation.

If your team members have a few causes they’re truly passionate about, consider making this a monthly or quarterly event. You can also rotate the charities that you’re helping out to accommodate your team’s different interests.

Why this exercise is great : Experiencing helper’s high can improve your personal health and mental state. Sharing this rush that doing good can give you will help your team bond on a deeper level. 

Benefits of team building

Team building is more than a fun break from your everyday routine at work. It also:

Improves communication, trust, and collaboration skills

Promotes a collaborative culture by bringing teammates together

Fosters agile decision making and problem solving skills

Boosts team productivity and morale

Uses creativity and outside-of-the-box thinking

Ashley Frabasilio believes that:

A common goal is to create a memorable and meaningful experience for folks to connect. Some questions to consider when planning an impactful team-building activity include: What do I hope folks walk away with? I.e., a new skill, a deeper connection to one another, personal development, a moment of delight, etc.”

Ask yourself these questions before proposing a team building activity so you can reap the full benefits of the exercise.

Bring your team together, creatively

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to build your team’s confidence, connection, and teamwork skills. While team building is fun, it’s also important to connect with your team on an everyday basis. To build one of those connections in your day-to-day work, the right collaboration software is key. 

Looking for the right collaboration tool? See how Asana keeps your team connected, no matter where you’re working. 

Related resources

How to accomplish big things with long-term goals

Fix these common onboarding challenges to boost productivity

30-60-90 day plan: How to onboard new hires with ease

15 types of employee performance reviews

20 Video Games To Play If You Love Solving Mysteries

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7 Video Game Heroes Who Rely On Their Wits

8 mystery games to sleuth to, 6 best isekai anime & manga where the protagonist is a detective.

• The video game mystery genre evolved from early text-based games, offering complex problem-solving experiences.
• Sought-after mystery games often intertwine with different genres such as adventure, action, and horror.
• Crime-solving video games like Disco Elysium and The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles offer unique narratives and immersive gameplay.

The mystery, police procedure, or detective genre of video games has an impressive library, and its evolution can be traced to the earliest "walking simulator" games that used only text commands. Players had to explore the area, gather clues, and collect certain important items. Puzzles, mystery solving, and collecting clues were part of the earliest games to exist, right after sports.

15 Twisty Mystery Games On PC

These twisted, nerve-wracking puzzle games are among the best mystery-oriented titles PC gamers should check out.

Many of these kinds of games often use the same concepts of investigating, gathering clues, and the powers of deduction that are similar to the daily activities of a police officer or private investigator. Games that focus on solving mysteries can and often do overlap with other genres including adventure, action, role-playing, and even horror.

Updated April 13, 2024 by Kristy Ambrose: Video games about solving mysteries or crime dramas continue to be popular, so there are a lot of new options to choose from along with vintage titles that have been released or remastered for present-day audiences.

Complex problem-solving can be more rewarding than a big explosion or a dramatic boss fight, and the best mystery games can be role-playing, story-based, or adventure games. This library is so vast that it's easy to find a variety of games for any port or format, and that includes phones, tablets, and consoles, along with conventional desktops.

1 Disco Elysium

Metacritic score: 89.

• Disco Elysium

This video game's art style, which mimics a surreal oil painting, is one of the features that sets Disco Elysium apart from other RPGs. It also features an unconventional progression system that includes skill checks and dialogue trees determined by Perception and pain threshold, which experienced RPGers might refer to as Fortitude.

The setting is a city in the aftermath of an apocalypse, and the main character is in the depths of amnesia, so there are a few more mysteries here other than the murder he's trying to solve. Even though he's missing most of his past, every main character still has a set of distinct character traits and a Thought Cabinet, which unlocks more backstory depending on the player's dialogue choices.

2 Her Story

Metacritic score: 86.

An interactive film that's also a video game, and one of the best modern examples of how the genre has evolved from the CD-ROM days. Her Story is independently developed and created by Sam Barlow, who formerly worked at Climax Studios, the same company that made Silent Hill : Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories .

The story is structured around police procedure , using a mix of different kinds of evidence that the protagonist has to examine, sometimes using forensics. The game includes a lot of live-action footage that Barlow created after studying real police interrogation videos.

3 Outer Wilds

Metacritic score: 85, outer wilds.

An action-adventure mystery video game that uses deep space as the setting, Outer Wilds is more about exploration and problem-solving than fighting. The premise of the game is that the universe is stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends in a supernova, which the main character will get caught in several times before they finish the game. Luckily they gain the ability to retain their memories beyond death during the first part of the story.

8 Hidden Secrets Many Still Haven’t Found In Outer Wilds

Although hidden secrets in open-world games are common, these secrets in Outer Wilds haven't been found by "many" players since the game's debut.

The player spends most of the game learning about an ancient race called the Nomai and their ultimate project, planned on a galactic scale, which is the source of the time anomaly. No pressure, but the protagonist has to piece together the clues from various logic puzzles to discover what happened and find a way to save the entire universe.

4 The 7th Guest

Metacritic score: 68.

• Platform(s): macOS, DOS, CD-i, PC, Linux, Mobile
• Released: April 28, 1993
• Developer: Trilobyte
• Genre(s): Puzzle, Adventure

The 7th Guest is a point-and-click mystery video game classic originally from the CD-ROM era that was remastered and re-released as a 25th Anniversary Edition in 2019. It was one of the first "haunted mansion" games, and also one of the first to integrate video graphics into a computer game in a way that contributed to the plot rather than just being silly.

This was also at a time that horror games actually started to emerge as a genre, and The 7th Guest didn't shy away from the sordid or the mysterious. This game looks fun and colorful, and it is, with the graveyard cake puzzles and wacky characters. As the story unfolds into one of the best mystery games ever made, it becomes clear this isn't a game for kids.

5 Paradise Killer

Metacritic score: 81, paradise killer.

The more concise summary of this game is that it's a sci-fi adventure with a murder mystery as the focus of the plot. A more detailed description would include that the whole thing is set in a pocket universe called Paradise Island, which has been constructed by aliens to trap and house humans.

It's used to lull them into a false sense of security before sacrificing their souls to construct the next incarnation of the same island. That's a whole lot of lore for a game that's relatively small in comparison, and the detailed narrative of Paradise Killer is what makes it better than average when it comes to mystery-solving games.

A survival horror game that includes solving mysteries, Signalis is designed as a third-person shooter and has a two-dimensional perspective. It was critically acclaimed and players gave it high praise, recognizing that it was inspired by similar resource-collecting and puzzle games like Resident Evil .

The sci-fi setting features a spaceship and a mysterious government known as the Nation of Eusan, at war with an even larger galactic empire. The game features androids called Replikas, which the nation of Eusna uses as soldiers, miners, and other grunt work. A few different endings are possible, depending on the progression of the story, and the Artifact Ending is the secret one that requires the player to collect three hidden keys.

7 The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter

Metacritic score: 82, the vanishing of ethan carter.

The Vanishing Of Ethan Carte r relies on stunning artwork and a compelling story to draw in aspiring detectives. This is one of the best mystery video games that combines an open-world environment with little guidance for how the mechanics work, and learning is part of the game.

The player follows a mystery through an impressive collection of artistic settings and immersive locations. It's the atmospheric quality of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter that most people cite as what elevates it from other mystery-solving games.

8 Grim Fandango

Metacritic score: 94, grim fandango.

An adventure game first and foremost, because this is LucasArts after all, Grim Fandango is also about solving a mystery. On a technical level, this is one of the first times that a 3D-rendered video game looked good, using an unconventional animation style that mixed film noir with calaca-like characters. The main character is a travel agent, but one who dwells in the afterlife and helps transport souls.

The 7 Most Mysterious NPCs In Gaming

It's hard to ignore the fact that some NPCs will never be fully understood due to their inherently mysterious natures.

Despite the critical acclaim that Grim Fandango received and the fanbase that follows it today, it was a commercial failure in its time. The game was re-released in 2015 with improved graphics, a new orchestral soundtrack, and a director's commentary.

9 Sam And Max Hit The Road

Metacritic score: 91.

• Developer: LucasArts
• Genre: Graphic Adventure
• Platform(s): MS-DOS, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows
• Released: 1993

Sam and Max, also known as the Freelance Police, have a lot of wacky adventures solving crimes and this title is still one of their most popular. The plot is set in motion when a Sasquatch goes missing from a carnival. The intrepid heroes have to use their perception and deduction skills as they visit several popular American tourist attractions looking for clues.

Sam And Max Hit The Road is part of the impressive library that LucasArts amassed when point-and-click adventure games were all the rage. It's distinctive for its humor, clever dialogue, and the best voice talent for games at the time.

10 Pentiment

A narrative adventure that's mostly text, the 2D animation fits the medieval aesthetic perfectly. Pentiment is the best mystery game for players who are interested in solving a mystery along with those who appreciate a unique and beautiful art style, which is used seriously here as opposed to a cartoony joke like in some other games.

The main character is Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist who gets mixed up in the murderous drama of 16th-century Upper Bavaria. Players can build this character's skills and backstory through choices they make in the dialogue. Set in the fictional town of Talsing in the Alps, the timeline of the game spans 25 years, and solving these mysteries becomes a lifetime commitment.

11 The Wolf Among Us

Metacritic score: 80, the wolf among us.

Fans of mystery-based video games who also like comic-book adaptations would probably enjoy The Wolf Among Us . It's intended as a prequel to the Fables comic book series, which was created and written by Bill Willingham and has been running since 2002.

This is a graphic adventure game that mostly works on point-and-click mechanics as the player explores a variety of different settings and environments. The player controls the main character, Bigby Wolf, formerly known as the Big Bad Wolf and now the mayor of Fabletown, who is tasked with solving a series of murders. A sequel to the game is scheduled for launch in 2024.

12 Heavy Rain

Metacritic score: 87.

An interactive drama and adventure mystery video game, Heavy Rain received numerous accolades from both players and critics for the play style, story, and overall design. There are four different protagonists involved and the player gets to control all of them at different points, and any number of choices causes the storyline to branch off into another direction.

The story begins with a tragedy and goes downhill from there. It's dark, visceral, and sometimes bloody, so be advised it's not for the faint of heart. Follow the clues left by a serial killer to save the protagonist's son before it's too late. This is a game where the player's actions do matter , so choose wisely as the dark streets of Philadelphia start to close in.

13 Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments

Metacritic score: 73.

• Platform(s): PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
• Released: September 30, 2014
• Developer(s): Frogwares
• Genre(s): Adventure

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's depiction of Sherlock Holmes was partly autobiographical. His use of forensics was new for its time, but the modern age has the same fascination with his skill for finding and interpreting clues. Many of the games in this series could also be likely candidates, but this game also includes moral choices that affect the gameplay.

10 Sherlock Holmes Mysteries You Should Read If You Love The Games

Sherlock Holmes is one of the greatest detectives in literature. With his new game out now, fans of the character should check out these stories.

On a more technical level, this is the first game in Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes series that uses Unreal Engine 3 to create an intense and immersive first-person POV. The written portions are intended to resemble the novels, and each game includes a variety of cases to solve, from murders to thefts to disappearances.

14 L.A. Noire

Noted for some stunning artwork and a realistic storyline , L.A. Noire takes place in Los Angeles in 1947. The protagonist is Detective Cole Phelps, and the story follows his rise through the LAPD. When Phelps takes on a case involving morphine distribution and some of his old World War II buddies, the plot thickens.

Aside from the main plot that is focused on cracking the case, there's a lot to keep the player busy in the form of car chases, gunfights, and hand-to-hand combat. Motion-capture technology was used to capture realistic human expressions for the interrogation sequences.

15 Professor Layton And The Curious Village

• Developer: Level-5
• Genre: Puzzle, Adventure
• Platforms: Nintendo DS, mobile, iOS, Android
• Released: February 10, 2008 (North America)

Solving a mystery doesn't always have to be about sordid crimes and dark alleyways. For those looking for something more lighthearted that's also great for the kids, some of the best mystery games can be found in the Professor Layton franchise. It has a familiar format that includes finding clues and solving puzzles.

Best Professor Layton Games, Ranked

Professor Layton is about to make his grand return, and it's the perfect time to revisit some of the best games in the franchise.

There are a total of seven games in this series, and this is the first. Professor Hershel Layton and his apprentice, Luke Triton, are looking for an artifact called the Golden Apple in a quaint but enigmatic little hamlet called St. Mystere. It's not just for fun and profit either because the holder of this special item will inherit the vast fortune of a local monarch.

16 Until Dawn

Metacritic score: 79.

It's the "teenagers lost in the woods" trope that never seems to get old, and although it's primarily a horror game, the main characters in Until Dawn have to hunt for clues regarding the mystery of the dangerous mountain wilderness and stay alive while they do it.

Until Dawn is a narrative and exploration game with little or no combat that relies on scenes and quick time events to progress. The story is intended to mimic the same suspense and terror as a slasher movie, with every decision affecting the future lives of the group, and everyone can live or die depending on what choices are made.

17 What Remains Of Edith Finch

Metacritic score: 88, what remains of edith finch.

The genre is part of a category of adventure games called "narrative-focused walking simulators," and even though the term is new, the concept is not. Myst was a game like this, and What Remains of Edith Finch has also received critical praise for its artwork and story. The setting is a mansion on an island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest and the time frame is the 1930s, so be prepared for a lot of marine and seaside themes . Although it sounds realistic, even dull, the elements of magical realism in the design keep the game immersive and compelling.

The player is the titular character, Edith, a teenager who is the last surviving member of her family. She is visiting her ancestral home for the first time in years and putting together the clues to reveal what happened in the time that she was gone.

18 The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

The great ace attorney chronicles.

A wildly successful franchise that gave the whole storybook design some clout, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is two of the games in the franchise neatly collected under one title. The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve and The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures both use the same courtroom drama and investigative structure as they collect clues and cross-examine witnesses to solve the mystery.

Brute force isn't the only way through, and these video game characters who rely on their smarts know that well.

The game takes place in the late Meiji Period of Japan, which lasted from 1868 to 1912, and the clothing, customs, and environment of the game reflect the overall aesthetic. That gives it a "period piece" charm that adds to the game's overall audience appeal.

19 Return Of The Obra Dinn

Return of the obra dinn.

The year is 1807, and the protagonist is an insurance agent for the East India Company. Their mission is to determine what happened to the passengers and crew of the Obra Dinn, with the aid of a mysterious pocket watch. The ship went missing off the coast of Good Hope, and after no sight or communication for some time, the ship drifted into port with nary a soul aboard.

For the investigative gamer out there, these mystery games are perfect to sleuth in and uncover many secrets that lurk within.

It's not exactly a rollercoaster ride, but for those players who like a story filled with suspense, mystery, and a touch of psychological horror, Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the best mystery games. It's based on investigation, information, and deduction, and Return of the Obra Dinn 's distinctive style has set it apart from other games in the independently-made category.

20 Hotel Dusk: Room 215

Metacritic score: 78.

• Developer(s): Cing
• Genre(s): Adventure, Mystery
• Platform: Nintendo DS
• Released: January 22, 2007

It's not a widely-known title because it's only available on one platform, the Nintendo DS , but Hotel Dusk: Room 215 is a highly-rated adventure mystery with design and artwork inspired by the film noir genre. Its success prompted a sequel, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West , which was released in 2010.

Kyle Hyde is the main character of the story, and keeping with the usual stereotype he's a cynical private eye with a five o'clock shadow and a chip on his shoulder. The protagonist has to solve puzzles along with searching for clues to solve, and each chapter of the game ends with an intense interrogation instead of a boss fight.

These isekai anime and manga feature detectives at the helm of their narratives, turning fantasy settings into a backdrop for solving mysteries.

The best puzzle games on PC

A very puzzling collection

Whether you like to visit space , indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure , get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking , the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC . The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.

We've got everything a puzzle-head might want: sokoban games, murder mysteries, strategy, physics, goo, and that one Jonathan Blow made. Puzzles are a broad church, after all. Best of all is that all of these are playable and ready to go, so there's no mucking about with emulators. We'll keep the list updated with the new best and brightest puzzle games, too, so check back every so often. Scroll down to read them all, or click a name that takes your fancy in the list below.

• How To Say Goodbye
• The Room 4: Old Sins
• The White Door
• Children Of The Sun
• The Case Of The Golden Idol
• Mini Motorways
• Patrick's Parabox
• Dorfromantik
• Baba Is You
• Botany Manor
• Return To Monkey Island
• Opus Magnum
• The Talos Principle
• Ctrl Alt Ego
• World Of Goo
• The Witness
• Outer Wilds
• Return Of The Obra Dinn

25. Unpacking

There may be some among you who object to Unpacking being classified as a puzzle game, and to those people I say: Boo! Boo to you! It's not the kind of headscratcher that'll see you rage-quitting a level until you've calmed down enough to have another go at it, but the challenge - to unpack and put away a person's possessions as they move to different homes throughout their life - is a puzzle. It's possible to get it wrong. As you open the brown boxes and pull things out of the rustling paper, you understand that it would not do to put the tooth paste in the kitchen. That goes in the bathroom, along with your towels and shampoo. If, once you've emptied all the boxes, some things aren't where they're meant to be, their outline will glow until you make room somewhere more appropriate. A ladle does not belong in the bedroom.

Part of the puzzle is fitting your things around the possessions of people you live with. If you move in with housemates, one of whom is making a Sailor Moon cosplay dress, there isn't much space in the living room. One level in particular broke my heart, as you have to find the right place to put your framed art degree once you move in with a new boyfriend. Unpacking isn't a puzzle like doing the cryptic crossword is. Unpacking is a puzzle like real life is.

24. How To Say Goodbye

This is sort of a sokoban, except you move the scenery around, and that allows you to move the characters. As a whole, the game tells the story of a recently-dead ghost, lost and disorientated in a land of the dead populated by simiarly disorientated spirits. The goal is to help these spirits move on, by solving the grid puzzles in levels to let them escape the purgatory world they're in. Each level has a door to escape through, but you might need to press buttons, find keys and avoid desperate Spleen ghosts. Many levels have several steps, and it'll take you a while to get the hang of how you can move things to you, rather than going to them. It's a twist on a familiar formula that will surprise you with how hard it can be.

The art is colourful and streamlined, inspired by children's picture books. It gives everything an appropriately unreal quality as you pull and push ghosts and obstacles around on the conveyor belt floors of the levels. And the levels themselves fit with that vibe. They're downright whimisical, from gardens, to messy kitchens, to the actual moon. But with the whimsy you also get a quiet story about grief and moving on. A lot to pack in one game.

23. The Room 4: Old Sins

The Room series always sees you, the unknown player character, lured to an isolated area full of complex puzzles that you have to solve. The very first Room was a room - an attic, in fact, and The Room 4 goes back to the attic. This time you're confronted with a very detailed dollhouse of a mansion, which turns out to be a model of the mansion you're in. The model is itself partly a puzzle box, with moving cogs and sections that open up as you interact with it, but it also, as you open up access to the different rooms, is a kind of magic portal to full-sized versions of said rooms. Inside these rooms are more puzzles.

The Room 4 is full of so many lovely machines: polished wood with hidden doors, polished cogs, sliding coloured pieces and buttons, and they all feel intricate and tactile, and like they were made by a craftsman. But there's a dark, almost Lovecraftian layer to The Room 4 as well, with many puzzles requiring the use of a magical eyepiece to see runes and symbols instrumental to understanding the solutions. There are tentacles. Old Sins is the most complicated but most satisfying of all the Room games yet.

22. The White Door

Not all puzzle games have to be maxi. The White Door is one of the more recent entries in the Rusty Lake series of 2D puzzle games, and is arguably the most minimalist. You control an amnesiac in what appears to be some kind of hospital room, where each day is planned out to a strict schedule. The game doesn't tell you this, of course, but the schedule is pinned to the wall for you to find. A nurse comes in to ask you questions: what's today's date?; how old are you?; where do you work? And you have to find the answers to these questions around the room. Subtle things change. You can see someone standing in the distance outside the window.

Every night you dream of events in your past, and can use them to untangle the events that brought you to this room in the first place. It's a short, spare game with nothing wasted. A locked room mystery with a twist.

21. Gorogoa

Gorogoa was designed for touchscreens, but you're not losing much at all when you play it on PC. The screen is divided into quarters, and you can zoom in and move them around to create new paths for the boy traversing them, letting him move from one to another by clearing a path in one section. You can even layer them on top of one another, putting a doorway in one frame over the top of the boy in another, so he can step through. At other times the panels becomes a kind of jigsaw that requires you to zoom in and out until you find the right perspective to match things up. You might need to place a fire under a steam cooker, or weight a shelf so it tips the right way.

This all plays out in beautiful 2D animations, and without any actual instructions. Gorogoa is fantastic and letting you experiment, sometimes nudging you the right way with some pictograms, but for the most part just letting you explore its living, moving world. It's both beautiful and innovative, in a way not many games of any genre manage, let alone puzzle games.

PlayDead's creepy, monochrome side-scrolling puzzle-platformer Limbo rightly caused a stir when it was released, because nobody had seen anything quite like it before. PlayDead managed to build on Limbo with Inside. Though Inside has a lot of similarities - a side on puzzle-platformer with a small, vulnerable protagonist, and dark themes - but it takes both it's ambient storytelling and how it plays to new heights. Inside's protagonist is a young boy who you join in the middle of being chased through a forest. The journey progresses through decreasingly rural areas, then through a weird science facility full of what appear to be mind controlled zombies and various human experiments. The ending is famously, er, surprising.

The puzzles themselves are a mix of logic applied to physics (put box a here and activate switch b to precipitate effect c) in surprising ways, and you can die in similar physics based ways that have quite graphic animations. But there are also puzzles that you solve by paying attention to the game world. One of the more memorable moments is having to disguise yourself in a line on shambling zombies by mimicking their movements at the right time. I don't know if that counts as a puzzle, exactly, but it's bloody good.

19. Children Of The Sun

The puzzles in Children Of The Sun are intricate, speed focused tactical puzzles to find the right path through a level, and that path must be through a bunch of dudes' heads. After escaping from an evil cult you, a nameless girl, have taken it upon yourself to exact revenge for the death of your mentor. Luckily you can do this with your natural telekinetic powers, meaning you can take out dozens of cultists with a single bullet. You begin each level skulking on the edges - in the darkness looking at a street, a warehouse, a drunken party in the forest - where you line up your shot. Once you pull the trigger, you play over the shoulder of the bullet.

Each time you hit a target you can reorient and shoot it again, tracing the bullet around the whole level by daisy chaining bloody and spectacular murder. But if you hit a wall or an obstacle, that's it. It's a short game, but it invites repetition as you perfect your kill score for each level, using different powers - like the ability to change direction, or speed up to penetrate armour - in an arms race against the cultists, who start showing up with shields and their own psy-powers as your reign of terror continues. Children Of The Sun is satisfying, intense, and ultraviolent, which isn't something you can say about a lot of puzzle games

18. The Case Of The Golden Idol

The Case Of The Golden Idol is a point and click detective game that strips out all the extraneous bullshit like walking around and talking to characters, so the time you save there can be redistributed to furiously staring at word bubbles. The Case Of The Golden Idol spans many decades in the lives of a couple of posh weirdos and their family and associates, all centering on the titular artifact. Every few years there are some (or several) murders relating to it, and you get to see them in a snapshot moment - either the moment the murder is committed or as the body is discovered - with the characters, scene and items all frozen.

By clicking around the scene you can investigate the contents of rooms, pockets and even brains, sorting through diaries and weapons and piecing together what happened. To solve each leve you'll need to identify who died, whodunnit, and what they dunnit with, but there are also optional tasks. At a dinner party where someone was poisoned you need to work out who was sitting where, but you can also figure out which of the servants' rooms belong to which servant. In one memorable level at a mansion, more than one person is on a different sort of drug. To fill in these answers you're provided with nouns and verbs to slot into sentences with gaps, and you can only move on when you get it right. It's difficult, but it's very worth it.

17. Mini Motorways

Have you ever been stuck in traffic commuting and thought, "what absolute fool designed this?" Now, thanks to Mini Motorways, that absolute fool can be you! The idea is to plan the road system of a city, getting people from their houses to where they need to be and back again, as efficiently as possible. The cities grow as the game goes on, so your roadways get more complicated, and you can put in things like roudabouts, motorways and traffic lights to keep things organised, but you have a limited number of these, as well as limited road tiles.

Houses, the population centres of your city, and workplaces keep mushrooming up across the confined map area, and they're colour-coded. A yellow workplace might appear next to a bunch of blue homes, while the yellow population density is mostly on the other side of the river. Junctions slow down traffic, so if you can put in roundabouts it all flows better, but roundabouts take up a lot of space. Maybe a motorway would help ease the congestion, but it might back up traffic either end. Mini Motorways is a continuous puzzle, in other words, and one that only gets harder the better you are at it.

16. Patrick's Parabox

The ouroboros is the ol' famous endless snake eating it's own tail thing. Patrick's Parabox is a bunch of boxes inside boxes, boxes eating eachother recursively, with puzzles inside. It's technically a sokoban game - you have to push boxes into the right places, and if you push them against a wall you can't pull them out. But you can push boxes (and yourself) into other boxes that have openings. These boxes themselves contain shapes that you can use to traverse and solve the puzzle outside the box. You have to think in boxes.

There are 350 hand-designed puzzles in this mind melter of a game, and Patrick's Parabox does a good job of teaching you the fundamentals of its rules so you can tackle more advanced puzzles. You can transport boxes inside boxes. You can put a box inside itself and start thinking in infinity. Multiple boxes can be stacked inside other boxes, like nesting dolls. Look, this game has a lot of boxes. It's an interesting and thoughtful twist on sokoban constraints that kind of makes you feel like a super-advanced mathematician.

15. Knotwords

This is sort of like doing a quick crossword but without any clues. You're given a small asymmetrical grid of empty squares, and within that grid are tetronimo shapes - maybe a foursquare, maybe a right angle made of three, and so on. You're told what letters go into each of the tetronimos, but not where. So that foursquare could contain the letters OVOW . Your job is to fill in all the letters so that every line accross and down makes an actual word.

This isn't as hard as it sounds, and you get into the swing of it pretty quickly. It can be tough when you realise that the word you were sure was your lynchpin turns out to be wrong, but there's a fair and helpful hint system. You also have a lot of puzzles to choose from, with more generating every month. It's a lot of fun if you like word puzzles, and it'll probably expand your vocabulary, too.

14. Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik is a lovely game. It's perfect for streaming. It's perfect for playing sitting on the sofa. You can get all intense and try and beat your high score and take it all seriously. But if you want, you can just have a lovely time building a pretty town. All these things are contained within Dorfromantik, a puzzle game where you place tiles to build a serene rural landscape.

You're given a stack of procedurally generated hexagonal tiles, each with one or a few different kinds of landscape on them - maybe a load of houses that could form a village or town, a bit of forest bordered by fields, or section of lake. Plopping these down joins them together to form your growing valley. But to get a high score you have to pay attention. Fulfilling quests - like the windmill wanting to be bordered entirely by fields, or a forest being large enough to accommodate deer - will give you more tiles to keep expanding, and if you can grow large enough then you'll find yourself in new biomes, or pre-placed locations that give you long term tasks. It's the right level of chilled out while still requiring some active thought.

13. The Looker

It's not often (read: it has never happened before) that a list contains both a game, and a parody of that game. But here we are. The Looker is a 2022 game that functions both as a very good bit of good-spirited fun-pokery at JoBlow's The Witness, and as a good puzzle game itself. The essential vibe of many areas of the island in The Witness are recreated, with a giant chess set, hedge mazes and a weird castle, but there's also an arcade dungeon and kind of piratical lookout. Scattered around these are a selection of puzzle boards, solved by drawing lines from a START to an END in a red pen.

What constitutes a start or an end can be flexible. The letters S and E both count, and in one puzzle there's no end, and you have to listen as the narrator beeps while you draw your line around a maze - literally, he says "beep". The puzzles are all logical within the established rules, but require thinking outside the box, and are playful to boot. And throughout you'll see little references to The Witness, like a framed picture resembling one of the tree puzzles. The laser beam boxes take an absurdly long time to power up, with so many steps involved. You can find little recording boxes around the place, and one of them is an advert for used cars. This game is free!

12. Baba Is You

Baba Is You isn't exactly a sokoban game. You're pushing stuff around to get to touch an object designated as the winning object, sure, and that pushing is subject to sokoban constraints, so if you push something into a corner it'll be stuck there. But in Baba Is You, you can change what the winning object is. Or, indeed, what the you is. Each level will also have word blocks that form statements: Baba is You, Flag is Win. But you can also push those word blocks around to make Flag is You, so instead you're controlling the little flag sprite. Maybe you can make Baba be You and Win at the same time, creating an instant shortcut for the whole level.

You can make it so you can walk through walls, you can change which items are hazardous, you can make Baba float, you can change the colour of objects. But every level has a solution, and training yourself to think the right way is tough. Luckily the game has llovely, simple, almost childish 2D drawings to represent everything, so it's very clear what everything is. Until you start moving it all around, that is.

11. Botany Manor

In Botany Manor you play a retired Victorian botanist, Arabella Greene, who has been tasked with filling a book with rare and unusual plants, and the specific environmental factors needed to make them bloom. To do this, you have to find the seeds around her large and beautiful manor, and recreate said factors. And to do that you need to gather clues - letters, train tickets, charts showing the amount of sugar produced by juicing specific varietals of apple, times of year that different moth species are out and about. Combining the right information will allow you to, for example, put the right amount of sugar in the soil for an ethereal cluster of white, snow drop-esque flowers to grow, or know the right combination of coloured light to shine to recreate sunset to see another plant spring into life before your eyes.

The setting of the manor is beautiful and quiet, but sunny, and there are no voices - Arabella doesn't talk to herself as she works - so it's an incredibly peaceful game, without being at all easy. The puzzles are surprising and delightful, and a bit magical, but grow in complexity. It's possible to spend five minutes searching the ground floor for a hint of the year that the manor was built, after a hint gleaned from a pious poem, and when you find it you feel proper smart. It's a fantastic puzzle game.

10. Return To Monkey Island

What's old is new again, and Return To Monkey Island gives Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman another spin around the most famous piratical adventure series that video games has ever produced. Set in an unknown period after the events of The Curse Of Monkey Island, Return To Monkey Island recounts Guybrush Threepwood (a mighty pirate) and actually find the secret of Monkey Island, which he tried to do in the first game but was distracted by falling in love with Elaine Marley, and fighting zombie pirate LeChuck over who most wanted to marry her.

Most importantly, this is a robust and interesting point and click puzzle game that uses fun cartoony logic in it's myriad puzzles (and there are two difficulty settings, too). As a beloved video game series, Return has locations, characters and even jokes from the old games, but adds a new spin. It's meta (but not in an annoying way) about Guybrush's status as a famous adventurer, because ultimately things are changing and maybe he doesn't mean as much any more, but it's not alienating if you've never played these games. There's a lot that's new , too, and the quality of life changes, which include getting rid of the nine-verb menu and an extremely reactive hint system, make this a fantastic game for old fans, but also to onboard players who're a bit leery of point and click adventures in general.

9. Opus Magnum

This is probably one of those puzzle games that secretly teaches you principles of computer coding, isn't it? In Opus Magnum you build automated machines whose repetetive movements will construct potions and poisons and what have you weirdnesses for you, an alchemist. There are programmable arms, tracks, pistons, and all manner of weird machines that you have to give meticulous instructions to. You can make arms pivot, pistons retract, control the exact amount they pivot when... It's overwhelming to start with, as you also have to take into account the timing, and how each of these elements move in concert with each other.

When you're faced with the challenged of putting two of a particular reagent together, in time for a third to be transformed and slotted on a rail so that they all come together, just as an arm is read to pick them up and drop them into the finished slot - and program it so the process can repeat without any of the mechanised bits lagging behind - you quickly see whether or not you're cut out for Opus Magnum. And that's a fairly simple puzzle. But there's a lot of open-ended flexibility here. If your machine works, it works. You can concentrate on making a beautiful, elegant machine with no parts wasted, but it still counts if you bodge together an awkward monstrosity. There's Steam Workshop integration, too, so you can struggle against challenges set from all over the world

8. The Talos Principle

The Talos Principle blends the old, as you explore the ancient ruins of different civilisations, and the new. The hazards on your puzzling progress being high tech forcefields, floating robotic explosives, and automatic mounted gatling guns. These you can stall using Jammers on tripods, so much of your puzzling is getting your timing right and figuring out the logic of what will happen if you drop a certian barrier at a certain time. Later on you use light splitting crystals, which you can use to charge up doors in complex trails around the ruins, and weighted cubes on pressure pads The aim is to collect what are, basically, tetronimoes that allow you to open the doors to the next area.

They're good puzzles, but a large part of the reason that people remember The Talos Principle is the story around that - which I won't spoil, but has to do with free will and personhood (as a lot of puzzle games do, for some reason). You're solving these puzzles because you were told to by a voice which calls itself Elohim, and announces that it's your creator. This voice gets, honestly, kind of sinister, and you can find different clues telling you to defy or obey Elohim as you play. Whether you do or not is up to you - The Talos Principle has more than one ending - but the story isn't over either way, it seems, because Croteam say they're still working on a sequel.

7. Ctrl Alt Ego

Ctrl Alt Ego also appears on our best hacking games list, because it's both - although, if we're being honest, it's more straightforwardly a puzzle game than a hacking game. Actually, being super honest, it's not really a straightforward puzzle game. You're a sort of disembodied AI presence, able to flit hack into a flit between different machines. This includes, for example, cameras on data banks, allowing you to scope things out, but also little robits to trundle around, or even littler ones that can sneak into tunnels and have a 'bark like a dog' function.

The aim is, broadly, getting from one end of the 3D level to the next, but there are obstacles a-plenty in your way. Apart from physical obastacles like boxes and barriers, there are enemy robots who can tell if your droids are going where they shouldn't be, and daddy units that can dissolve matter. But fear not, because you can hack into them to dissolve and reposition things. Lateral thinking is encouraged and, indeed, essential, and if you die it's fine, cos you just go back to being disembodied and can have another go at it.

6. World Of Goo

This was our Game Of The Year in 2008, and it's still ruddy bloody good, as confirmed by Ollie when he revisited it in 2022 . In fact "World Of Goo still offers more fun than nearly any puzzle game since" was the lofty praise he gave it, so it's surely worth a punt. In simple terms World Of Good is a physics-based bridge builder, crossed with Lemmings. You have to get your goo balls to the exit in the level, and you do that by building structures out of the goo themselves, building bridges, towers and pendulums out of their sticky, stretchy, non-Newtonian bodies.

The goo isn't (aren't?) that struturally sound, though, and are given to buckle under their own weight. Luckily there are different subspecies of goo, like pink ones that can float like helium and give you some lift, flammable goo, or green velcro goo so you can sort of rebuild structures mid-level. World Of Goo is both chaotic and elegant, and is still a marvellous achievement this many years later.

5. Unavowed

So you got possessed by a demon who murdered a bunch of people over the year they spent in your body. Mondays, am I right? But, freshly de-demoned, you join a group of supernatural cops who solve supernatural crimes in lush, detailed pixelart, and with a cast of amazing voice actors bringing it all to life. An escaped muse is going overboard on the inspiration thing, a baby has been kidnapped by faries - you know, magic cop stuff. These events all tie together in a story of rising darkness and so on, but though that's all good, the really impressive thing about Unavowed is how layered and complex the game is.

You can pick one of three origins (cop, actor or barkeep) which affects the characters you already know in the game, and how you approach problems. Your fellow Unavowed agents are also a varied bunch, including a medium accompanied by a ghost, and a fire mage. You pick two of them to accompany you on each level, and this, to affects what happens and how. Having the medium along means you can see and talk to any ghosts around the place; the fire mage... you know. An ex-cop can shoot a window out where someone else might break it. There are layers and layers of cleverness and complexity to peel back.

4. The Witness

The island of The Witness is very big, with a castle, an orchard, a severe-looking dock, a swamp, a lab, blossom trees, a desert bit, a forest, a mountain, a sort of treehouse - just, loads of weird bits. And each of these bits are full of puzzles - each area having a slightly different flavour of puzzle, though they're basically all getting a line from one side of a little input board to the other - teaching you the rules of how to solve things in The Witness. The orchard has puzzles that mirror the apple trees in front of you. Some maze puzzles need you to look at the shapes of shadows. The swamp has tetronimo shapes on it's puzzle boards, and the treehouse has white and dark stars. I didn't get on with either of those at all. Or the puzzles in the forest where you have to listen out for the tone of birdsong, those can, candidly, go absolutely to hell.

But many of the other puzzle types made complete sense to me. And you might hate the ones that I understood straight away. What makes The Witness so impressive is what makes it hard to describe: it's sort of every kind of puzzle game at once. And, on top of that, you're walking around a weird island, listening to cryptic voice notes and wondering who put all these machines there in the first place. Eventually, if you play it long enough, you can see there are puzzles all around you...

It was one of the best games full stop when it came out, and it still is. Portal is genuinely fantastic, with actual, very good environmental storytelling, one of the best antagonists ever immortalised in pixel form, and - yes - brilliant puzzles. You play a (in classive Valve style) voiceless and almost-nameless protagonist who wakes up in a testing facility, having, at some point, volunteered to be a test subject for Aperture Science and, at some point, going into cryo-sleep. Now, an undisclosed length of time in the future, you're woken by a suspiciously cheery AI and thrown into a series of testing chambers to complete physics based puzzles with a gun that fires portals.

The now-legendary GLaDOS grows more personal as she tests you, progressing through the levels between passive aggressive and homicidal with alarming rapidity. The testing facility is suspiciously empty, and eventually you start to see what's behind the pristine white walls. But the way Portal teaches you the rules of the game, how its physics and portals work, and the puzzles it presents you with, all have you thinking in an entirely different way by the end of the game. It's a classic for a reason.

2. Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is a unique puzzle game meets ramshackle space exploration. You wake up as the newest member of the Outer Wilds cosmonaut team, about to take your first solo flight (in a spaceship made of bins) away from your tiny home planet. It genuinely is tiny, too - it'd take you about four minutes to walk around it, but that's a precious amount of time to take, given that the sun in the centre of your tiny solar system goes supernova 22 minutes after you open your eyes.

Thank god that a magic statue in your town's museum gets you stuck in a timeloop, resetting the moment you die to start the day all over again. Using this ability, you can zoom around the different planets orbiting the sun and explore them - to within the limits of your oxygen meter, which is refilled either by trees or by returning to your ship. There's a lot to see, which is where the repeating loops come in. There are twins, one spilling sand into the other like an hourglass, revealing ruins on the first as the structures on the second are filled up. One is a puzzle planet. One is an exploded shell turned into a weird poket universe inside a multidimensional bramble. You can follow the sound of instruments to fellow scattered cosmonauts. The solution to Outer Wilds' puzzle is the universe.

1. Return Of The Obra Dinn

I think Return Of The Obra Dinn is this site's current favourite game - it is, after all, at the top of our top 100. It's hard to imagine what could unseat it from the number one spot on best puzzles, either. Return Of The Obra Dinn is a large game of what Eurogamer's Christian Donlan called "nautical murder sudoku" in his review . The titular Obra Dinn is a tall ship that went missing, and now it has reappeared with every living soul on board having died. Your job is a kind of magical insurance auditer armed with a Bernard's watch activated by death, which will show you the still-life moment of a person's death. You can walk freely around the scene, and daisy chain another death into more dioramas, all in a glorious monochromatic style mimicing much earlier games.

The challenge is to match up each body with the ship's manifest and a cause of death. This body belongs to the captain, who was shot by y, that sort of thing. Your choices are only revealed as correct once you've got three compleletely right at once. It's masterfully done, the more so because, as things progress, you notice some decidedly suspicious death options, including crushing and dismemberment... There's a point in Return Of The Obra Din where you open the cabin door, walk onto the deck, and realise the game has shifted gear. Encountering these deaths out of order, you eventually managed to put the whole story together, and it's one accompanied by screams, rending wood, and an absolutely banging soundtrack full of bells.

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The Top 30 Puzzle Games On Steam

The best puzzle games can hook even the most resilient players, and these puzzlers on Steam are some of the best ones available.

• Steam offers a collection of the best puzzle games, including innovative titles and more traditional experiences.
• Thanks to the genre's versatility, puzzle games often have a sub-genre, such as platforming or horror.
• Steam has a wide variety of fun multiplayer puzzle games and more story-based single-player experiences.

There's an ideal genre of games out there for everyone. If you love a challenge based on mystery and puzzles, you will most certainly enjoy the puzzle game genre. Not only does it consist of very traditional brain teasers involving numbers and riddles, but also some graphically impressive first-person shooters.

10 Best Indie Puzzle Games

However, it's increasingly harder to find good puzzle games in a market where the majority of titles are either RPGs or adventure games. So, here is a collection of the best puzzlers that Steam has to offer, all of which will keep you glued to your screen.

Updated on May 9, 2024, by PJ Molloy: Steam is still the best place to look for innovative puzzle games, and we've added a new recommendation to help you put your brain to the test.

30 Moonleap

A cute pixel puzzler.

Moonleap is an adorable indie puzzle platformer whose obstacles change every time you jump. The goal is to collect all the stars in each stage, keeping in mind that jumping causes enemies to either attack or stop, spikes to appear or vanish, etc.

The strategy comes from timing your jumps to create a path forward. It's a simple concept yet difficult to master, creating a nice balance between accessibility and challenge. While the game is short, the brain teasers are well-designed and enhanced by a cute pixel art style.

29 Humanity

An abstract puzzle game about community and purgatory.

To learn more, check out our review of Humanity !

In Humanity, you play as a Shiba Inu who guides a crowd of mindlessly walking people to a ray of light at the end of purgatory. To do so, you must place command panels on the ground so that the humans can perform actions such as jumping, turning, hovering, etc.

Levels are designed like puzzle boxes, requiring you to rotate the camera, look at a stage from different angles, and find ways to maneuver the crowd around enemies and obstacles. You can even create your own puzzles and upload them for others to play.

28 A Little To The Left

A cozy puzzler starring a troublemaking cat.

A Little to the Left is an organizational puzzle game with plenty of coziness and charm . The gameplay involves stacking and sorting household items, including decorative glasses, books, disheveled desks, and fruit stickers. The catch? An adorable cat often gets in the way of your solution.

There are over 75 puzzles entailing various mechanics and methods, some of which can even have multiple ways of being done. The art style has a delightful and inviting hand-drawn look that's especially pleasant to the eyes when dragging and turning objects.

27 Viewfinder

An innovative first-person game where photos come to life.

You can search the entire Steam store and never find anything like Viewfinder. The puzzles center around taking pictures of objects and the surrounding environment. You can then place these photos down to create paths and open routes around obstacles.

It might sound simple enough, but you'll be completely mesmerized once you start playing and indulging in the mechanics. The gameplay encourages you to look at problems from new perspectives, creating an immersive and innovative experience unlike anything else in the genre.

26 Return Of The Obra Dinn

A time-bending murder mystery, return of the obra dinn.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a captivating puzzle adventure known for its innovative gameplay and intriguing narrative. As an insurance investigator in the early 19th century, you must unravel the murder mysteries surrounding the abandoned ship Obra Dinn by traveling back in time to the moments of the crew's demise.

The game's distinctive monochromatic art style and haunting soundtrack create an eerie atmosphere that enhances the experience. With a focus on deduction and logical reasoning, coupled with its engaging storytelling and challenging puzzles, it is a must-play for those seeking exceptional brain teasers.

25 Sherlock Holmes The Awakened

A mystery crossover featuring holmes and cthulhu.

In 2023, Sherlock Holmes the Awakened joined the fantastic lineup of video game remakes. In this puzzler, Ukrainian developer Frogwares takes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's beloved character and combines his investigative adventure with H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

13 Best Mystery Games On Steam

When a string of mysterious kidnappings plagues the world, it's up to Holmes and Watson to catch the vicious cult responsible. The supernatural riddle takes them across Europe and the United States to spooky abandoned buildings, eerie swamps, and more. This is an excellent choice if you like classic mystery stories or Lovecraftian horror.

24 The Past Within

A spooky co-op puzzle game.

The Past Within brings a more chilling psychological horror vibe into the puzzle realm. The gameplay is an intriguing co-op experience combined with Rusty Lake's signature art style. You and a friend move between 2D and 3D environments to solve brain teasers. The catch is that one of you is in the past while the other is in the future.

Having two people help each other complete puzzles in different time periods provides a fresh twist to the genre. The result is a uniquely cohesive experience that is equally fun and delightfully bone-chilling.

What If Frankenstein Was A Puzzle Game?

Birth's premise and visual style deliver a highly original, almost Tim Burton-like aesthetic. Your character is a figure made of bones who finds themselves alone and decides to build a new partner. This can be accomplished by collecting the necessary bones and organs throughout puzzle environments.

Even though you can customize your character, the gameplay is a first-person point-and-click style progression around a 2D environment. The world takes you to various locations like apothecaries, libraries, and flower shops with interactive spots containing puzzles that zoom in to fill your screen.

22 Escape Simulator

Solve escape rooms from the comfort of your home.

Escape rooms are perfect puzzle environments, and Escape Simulator is precisely as it sounds. It's a series of interactive puzzles within themed escape rooms, which you can solve solo or online with a group. There are 25 stages, each designed by actual escape room operators.

It's a great way to have the experience without leaving your home or spending exorbitant amounts of money. Even better is the built-in room editor, where you can design your own stages and have the chance to play puzzle rooms others create.

21 It Takes Two

A breathtaking co-op puzzle platformer, it takes two.

Sometimes, figuring stuff out is better with a friend, and few puzzle games offer a better co-op experience than It Takes Two. You and a pal control May and Cody, a married couple who are transformed into tiny dolls and must return to their normal lives.

The gameplay centers around platforming and puzzle-solving as you work together to find ways around obstacles. The adventure takes you across massive beehives, giant jazz clubs, and many other imaginative locations, each with unique brain-teasers and mechanics to ensure the journey is always fresh and exciting.

20 Human: Fall Flat

A silly physics-based puzzle platformer.

While there have been plenty of games that include physics puzzles, none of them are like Human: Fall Flat. You play as a customizable human with a uniquely bizarre control scheme. Their unpredictable movements add a layer of difficulty to the game.

After learning how to walk and grab properly, you must figure out how to use the physics and goofy moveset to solve puzzles. The game doesn't hold your hand, leading to a sense of accomplishment when you finally get through a door or over a wall, especially if you're playing co-op.

19 Tetris Effect: Connected

The classic puzzle game reimagined as an emotional journey, tetris effect: connected.

Tetris Effect: Connected takes the legendary block-stacking gameplay you know and love and reimagines it as a VR audio and visual experience. The game is known for its breathtaking backgrounds and stunning music, which constantly change depending on your actions.

8 Best Multiplayer Games On Steam

Everything from rotating a tetromino to clearing a line produces a sound or visual effect that becomes part of the melody or environment. While the world is even more awe-inspiring and immersive with a VR headset , the visuals are just as gorgeous without one.

18 Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince

A stunning fantasy puzzle platformer to play with friends.

Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince is a fantasy puzzle platformer centered around using magic to solve brain teasers. The plot follows Amadeus the Wizard, Pontius the Knight, and Zoya the Thief, who are tasked with saving Prince Selius, whose nightmares literally come to life.

The game can be played alone or cooperatively with friends as you use each hero's unique abilities and skill trees to solve physics-based puzzles. The stunning 2.5D art style and vibrant colors create a gorgeous fairytale world that evokes the feeling of stepping into a picture book.

17 The Witness

A stunning open-world puzzler, the witness.

Imagine walking around a gorgeous open-world environment while solving puzzles and piecing together your own story. That's The Witness in a nutshell. Without any recollection of your past, you wake up on an island filled with mysteries and strange brain teasers.

The Witness' strength comes from its size and robustness. It has well over 500 puzzles, some of which are real head-scratchers. The game has a bit of a learning curve when it comes to solving its problems, but there's nothing more rewarding than solving a particularly tough riddle.

16 Bejeweled 3

A timeless puzzle game about matching colors.

Sometimes, the best form of entertainment comes in simple shapes and colors. There's a reason why games like Bejeweled 3 are so popular. They almost magically appeal to a part of the human brain that wants to combine similar objects.

Bejeweled 3 is a classic addition to this sub-genre of puzzle games and needs no further introduction. It's a game you can get sucked into for hours upon hours, and while it lacks greater meaning and substance, it's truly engaging and timeless.

15 We Were Here Together

A spooky multiplayer escape room.

In We Were Here Together, you and a buddy assume the roles of Antarctic explorers who must answer a distress signal. Your journey takes you to a haunted medieval castle home to an evil force known only as "The Jester."

You must work as a team to explore the estate, communicate through walkie-talkies, solve puzzles, and unravel the mystery behind the entity lurking in the shadows. The gameplay seamlessly combines escape room simulation with light survival horror elements to create a spooky co-op experience.

14 Superliminal

A mind-melting adventure where nothing is what it seems, superliminal.

Games that play tricks on your mind can be a headache. Still, Superliminal manages to be exciting, fun, and extremely weird. By changing the size of objects and moving them around, you must find your way through a strange environment while gathering collectibles and completing challenges.

In this game, your surroundings are definitely not what you think they are. Everything you see and hear should be questioned at all times. It's a game worth replaying and will undoubtedly make you question reality.

13 Hexcells

A numeric puzzler with new twists around every corner.

Hexcells is an incredibly zen numeric puzzle game that surpasses Minesweeper in many aspects. Instead of solving the same puzzle over and over again, the rules shift and change as the game progresses, providing fresh brain teasers the more you play.

The Best 2D Games On Steam

A lot of puzzle games can be frustrating even for the most talented and logical thinkers. However, many PC owners have described Hexcells as the opposite of that, even if the game does provide a new challenge with each world or level.

A Simple Yet Challenging Puzzle Game About Connecting Shapes

There's no other puzzle game quite as aesthetically pleasing as LYNE. With a simplistic yet beautiful color palette and a nice geometric look, this game is meant to calm your soul while challenging you level after level.

LYNE is all about connecting the shapes, which might seem like an easy task at first. However, as the difficulty rises, it requires a lot of creative, out-of-the-box thinking. After you progress enough, you can unlock new color schemes for the game.

11 Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes

A chaotically fun co-op puzzle game.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party game in which you must work together to stop a bomb. One person is tasked with defusing a complex explosive, while the others have access to the manual explaining how to do it but can't see the bomb.

The group and solo player must communicate with each other to prevent the explosion before it's too late. It's the perfect co-op puzzler for a game night and even better with a VR headset.

Top 25 best puzzle games for iPhone and iPad (iOS)

25 essential iOS puzzle games to start your collection

Updated on April 19, 2023 - re-checked the list. This genre is right at the heart of the mobile gaming experience. Therefore, we decided to create a list of the best iOS puzzle games for iPhones and iPads !

It fits the environment perfectly - small, largely static (or at least slow-paced) titles that don't require lavish visuals or complex controls, and which will reward however much time you're able to commit to them.

It's not surprising to find that the App Store is positively brimming with puzzle games , then. But finding the best puzzle games for iOS is no easy feat.

They come in all shapes and sizes, from old-fashioned match threes to crazy experimental flights of fancy. And the ground between those two extremes is vast. Imagine this - nowadays, you can even find puzzle RPGs (which was unheard of a few years back)!  Also read:

• Best iOS multiplayer games
• Best iOS games with controller support

Best puzzle games for iPhone and iPad

We're sure that you have a few select ones that we haven't listed, but that's partly because of what we mentioned above. There are just so many! 

Instead, we've tried to focus on the few select titles that really stood out to us and distinguished themselves in some sort - be it they've got unique graphics, never-before-seen mechanics or especially tricky perplexities. That's what we tried to look out for, so while you might see some premium titles (like Gorogoa), you'll also find free-to-play ones that can be plenty of fun (such as Pink)! 

So, let's take a look at some of the best iPhone puzzle games , shall we?

1 Monument Valley 2

Like the original, Monument Valley warps reality and assaults your eyes with otherworldly landscapes. Rarely has a runaway mainstream hit felt so daringly experimental. With the problem-solving aspect falling somewhere in between 3D and mind-twisting, it is a great title to get you started.

The graphics are gorgeous, but while that's an aspect that deserves our appreciation in a different post, you'll find that this creation meets all the expectations. That's why it's one of the best puzzle games iPhone users can get their hands on, even years down the line.

2 Text Express: Word Adventure

Text Express: Word Adventure is an interesting puzzle game where you have to solve crosswords and a lot more. The gameplay is great, and the story and atmosphere are also remarkable. Text Express is a perfect choice for both children and adults if you want to relax and enjoy your time.

Text Express: Word Adventure was nominated for the best mobile puzzle game at the Pocket Gamer Awards 2022 and won it! The users of our website consider it to be the best puzzle of the year, and we definitely agree with them!

A rare masterpiece, Gorogoa combines a clever picture-shifting mechanic with a beautiful storybook art style. It's quite wonderful but challenging at the same time. We added it as one of our best iPad puzzle games since the bigger screen is going to make it a lot more enjoyable.

Also, Gorogoa is best served in one sitting though because the story is a mesmerizing one and you won't want to miss a thing! You'll find stunning hand-drawn illustrations, unexpected obstacles, and an alluring narrative. What else could you want?

4 Grindstone

One of the finest titles from the initial Apple Arcade offering - which is really saying something. Grindstone's tactile match-three battling is a real treat. It's nothing like you would expect from a classic match-3 game, and that is mainly thanks to its unique approach.

Players will have plenty of levels to grind their stones (if I may say that), and with such great-looking graphics, it's an absolute treat. Grindstone is a must-try for all the match-three enthusiasts. We even have some Grindstone beginner tips to help you out!

Puzzlers used to be functional looking and targeted at the logic centres rather than seeking any kind of emotional response. Prune turns all that on its head with its achingly beautiful grown-'em-up gameplay. It's not what one might expect at the start, but it's one of those unique approaches to the genre we mentioned in our introduction.

Prune has been, and still is, one of the most beautiful iPhone puzzle games out there - not only that, but it's also extremely relaxing, although it poses a challenge every now and again.

6 The Room: Old Sins

Even four entries in, the intricate locked-box puzzles within puzzles of The Room series continue to enthral. When it's as perfectly executed as The Room: Old Sins, we could happily take several more.

While it is a premium title, it's well worth its price. Not only do the graphics amaze us with their realism, but also the gameplay is spot on - it's everything one could want from a real mystery experience. Talk about unique-looking games executed well! We have a video review for The Room: Old Sins , so if you're curious about how it plays, make sure to check it out!

This fiendishly clever number-based title should have a place on every mobile device. Accept no imitations.

With plenty of spark that has (somewhat) cooled off over the years, Threes! is, and has been, a title that stood out. It's easy to understand why that is, especially when you have a title with so much potential playtime. And no, before you ask, you don't need to like maths to like Threes! - in fact, it could be quite the opposite. You might even start (slightly) liking maths after you've played it.

8 Ticket to Earth

You've probably noticed that in our introduction we mentioned RPGs - well, here's one! It's not often that you find a title with a rollicking story, but that's precisely what Ticket to Earth provides. At heart, it's a block-matching title, but one that adds in compelling RPG elements and glorious comic book visuals.

The premium price is well-justified by its quality, so if that's what you're looking for in this genre, don't feel guilty about it. Ticket to Earth is one of the best iPhone puzzle games, and that won't change anytime soon.

9 Mini Metro

At your disposal is the whole modern world, all the megacities that today have a subway. Will you be able to organize the transport system in such a way that everything functions without delays and other problems? You are given a complete list of tools for work, but to dispose of them correctly is the very puzzle that will test your skills as a manager and builder.

For those of you eager to try it, you can take a look at the tips for Mini Metro that might open up some new paths for you (no pun intended).

10 Yankai's Peak

A highly challenging abstract puzzler from Kenny Sun that keeps drawing you back in. Rotating coloured triangles into place across its compact levels is a mind-bending delight. It might seem simple, but it's one of the best iOS puzzle games that does exactly what it's meant to do without much effort.

This hand-crafted gimmick of a game is ideal for testing your logical thinking in the direst situations. It could even be called a little psychedelic, if you may. It all depends on how you look at it.

11 The Witness

The Witness might look and even feel like a first-person adventure, but its beautiful free-roaming hub world is underpinned by fiendishly clever line-drawing puzzles. It is the ideal title for kicking back and relaxing at the end of an exhausting day, because thanks to its beautiful atmosphere, it will fill you right up with energy!

Similar articles:

• Best puzzle games for Android
• Best Switch puzzle games

12 Evergarden

You thought you knew all about the most enjoyable iOS puzzle games? Think again. This enchanting experience takes the advanced match-and-evolve gameplay of Triple Town to the next level, with a hexagon-based grid and a beautiful 3D art style.

Evergarden feels like an enchanted title, where each move could give birth to something new and intriguing. And that's only part of the story. You should definitely give this one a try, it's as good as it gets!

13 Good Sudoku

To the uninitiated, Sudoku can feel like a foreign language. Zach Gage feels your sense of mystification and has made this comprehensive take on the popular pencil-and-paper intellect booster. Whether you're a Sudoku newbie or a veteran, Good Sudoku will more than live up to its name.

And no, you don't need to know the what s and how s of this popular title to ace it. You can start slow, and move your way up to more advanced sudokus.

Bart Bonte is renowned for his colour-coded abstract puzzlers, and Pink is the brightest yet. Each brain-teaser is a clever, meta delight that will challenge your rods and cones to the next level. While the levels might seem simple at the start, they'll quickly evolve into something a little more... fantastic.

If you're feeling up for the challenge, give it a shot! And while you're at it, you could also check out Green, Red, Yellow, or Blue! They're all equally amazing, so pick your colour and get to solving them!

15 Campfire Cooking

Games with a cooking theme have been around for a while, but none quite seemed to integrate the "cooking" part as well as Campfire Cooking. The beauty in this title is not from the graphics alone, but from the gameplay too. It is one of the few iPhone puzzle games you can almost always find time to play!

A grid-based title with some of the most delicious presentations around. In place of blocks and tiles, here you're shuffling around marshmallows and cooking pots. Tasty.

A stylish casual puzzler that asks you to rotate a series of boldly decorated rooms through 360 degrees, matching up colour-coded items of furniture. Empty. is a minimalistic title, but with a massive appeal once you get the hang of it. In essence, it's quite simple. At a closer look, it requires more than just a couple of twists and turns.

You won't decorate in Empty, but instead, make things disappear. Now THAT'S a unique approach. Don't forget to read our Empty. review , since it'll give you all the details you need to get started on this stunning iPhone puzzle game.

17 Photographs

You thought there could be a list without as much as a pixel graphic title? Wrong.

It is not at all what one might expect though. A narrative with a real heart, Photographs will tug your heartstrings just as much as it tickles your neurons with its block-sliding gameplay. It's one of the absolute most satisfying puzzle games on iOS we ever played, hands-down. Just read our Photographs review .

Each story is different, and each one is uniquely beautiful in its own sense. One aspect that cannot go overlooked though, is its cleverness. You actually need to pay attention to everything, because nothing is 'just there". Every feature of perplexity has a deeper meaning.

18 Framed 2

Have you ever dreamed of creating an interesting comic? While you might not be able to actually do that, you can control the action of the characters! In Framed 2, much like in Framed, you'll have to arrange panels in order to reveal a certain outcome to a story.

It's clever, it's unique, but most certainly it is fun. A challenging title that features mysteries, fun stories, and great-looking graphics.

19 Song of Bloom

You don't typically equate the puzzler genre with strong narratives, but Song of Bloom achieves that rare balance with some aplomb. It's the story of a search for meaning, told through a bunch of eclectic problems that require logical thinking, keen observation, and experimentation.

With ever-changing art styles and fitting music for each level, you'll have to figure out some rather... unique ways of solving the mysteries. Looking for one of the greatest iPhone puzzle games? Give this one a shot.

Another bright, minimalistic title from the developer of Zenge and Scalak. OXXO is essentially a 3D sliding puzzle, with plenty of clever flourishes.

What starts off as a simple one-dimensional title, will soon come to be a true 3D experience that will leave you scratching your head. It's challenging, despite its simple approach. A true masterpiece. Don't forget to read our OXXO review , since it'll tell you more about this challenging iOS puzzler - it might even make you want to try it for yourself!

21 7 Billion Humans

A game that utilises the basic principles of coding doesn't exactly sound like a barrel of laughs, but 7 Billion Humans pulls the whole off with style and substance. It seems complicated at best, but you'll soon discover that it's all for good reason. When the world gets overtaken by robots, nothing will seem too simple after all.

However intricate it might look, if you just follow a few simple principles, you'll find yourself loving 7 Billion Humans more and more every second. We have a 7 Billion Humans review too - so, if you're not sure whether or not this puzzler is right for you, make sure to check it out.

22 Golf Peaks

It might look like dull isometric golf, but Golf Peaks is actually an ingenious card-based puzzler that has you laying down golf shots in the right sequence. The simple graphics make this (slightly) complex title more appealing, giving it a rather cartoonish look, even though the levels will soon prove to be straight out of hell.

Golf Peaks is a clever reminder that looks can be quite deceiving, especially when it comes to mobile games. It's a top-notch puzzle game for iPhone that will not disappoint you, golf fan or otherwise - you can read our review of Golf Peaks if you need further convincing!

23 The Gardens Between

You don't often get the 'have to' phrase before premium games, but this one is a must. The Gardens Between is hand-down one of the best iPhone puzzle games out there, and for all the right reasons.

This side-scrolling puzzler ingeniously plays with time in various (clever but accessible) ways and marries its temporal manipulation with an utterly dreamy art style. It's absolutely stunning. We even have a review of The Gardens Between , so if you're curious how it actually feels while playing, make sure to read it.

You don't normally associate puzzlers with rhythm, but that's precisely what ELOH brings to the table. This charmer has you deflecting streams of pips, forming delightful percussive loops along the way. It's a most relaxing experience, where you get to solve various stages by enjoying a good beat.

Basically, it's related to basic geometry, and it's quite fun. After solving the most complex puzzles you'll have the true 'Eureka' moment. ELOH is going to bring you true Zen - what more could you ask for?

25 Baba is You

Baba is You has a quite unique approach to the whole puzzle genre. It got a few awards for it, and for a good reason, it's hard to think of a concept that's new in today's world. Namely, the game looks like the old Sokoban, where you need to move blocks in a certain order to finish a level. Baba is You has expanded this concept and went much further.

At each level, you have some fundamental rules written in blocks. Like 'Rock| is | Stop' means that you can't go through rocks. But you can move the block that says |stop| and guess what happens? You can move through obstacles! Breaking the basic rules set is much more fun than you think, basically, you can shift them however you want, and find different ways to complete the levels. Mindbreaking, isn't it?

14 Best Team Building Problem Solving Group Activities For 2024

The best teams see solutions where others see problems. A great company culture is built around a collaborative spirit and the type of unity it takes to find answers to the big business questions.

So how can you get team members working together?

How can you develop a mentality that will help them overcome obstacles they have yet to encounter?

One of the best ways to improve your teams’ problem solving skills is through team building problem solving activities .

“86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.” — Bit.AI

These activities can simulate true-to-life scenarios they’ll find themselves in, or the scenarios can call on your employees or coworkers to dig deep and get creative in a more general sense.

The truth is, on a day-to-day basis, you have to prepare for the unexpected. It just happens that team building activities help with that, but are so fun that they don’t have to feel like work ( consider how you don’t even feel like you’re working out when you’re playing your favorite sport or doing an exercise you actually enjoy! )

What are the benefits of group problem-solving activities?

The benefits of group problem-solving activities for team building include:

• Better communication
• Improved collaboration and teamwork
• More flexible thinking
• Faster problem-solving
• Better proactivity and decision making

Without further ado, check out this list of the 14 best team-building problem-solving group activities for 2024!

Page Contents (Click To Jump)

Popular Problem Solving Activities

1. virtual team challenge.

Virtual Team Challenges are popular problem-solving activities that involve a group of people working together to solve an issue. The challenge generally involves members of the team brainstorming, discussing, and creating solutions for a given problem.

Participants work both individually and collaboratively to come up with ideas and strategies that will help them reach their goals.

Why this is a fun problem-solving activity: Participants can interact and communicate with each other in a virtual environment while simultaneously engaging with the problem-solving activities. This makes it an enjoyable experience that allows people to use their creative thinking skills, build team spirit, and gain valuable insights into the issue at hand.

Problem-solving activities such as Virtual Team Challenges offer a great way for teams to come together, collaborate, and develop creative solutions to complex problems.

2. Problem-Solving Templates

Problem-Solving Templates are popular problem-solving activities that involve a group of people working together to solve an issue. The challenge generally involves members of the team utilizing pre-made templates and creating solutions for a given problem with the help of visual aids.

This activity is great for teams that need assistance in getting started on their problem-solving journey.

Why this is a fun problem-solving activity: Problem-Solving Templates offer teams an easy and stress-free way to get the creative juices flowing. The visual aids that come with the templates help team members better understand the issue at hand and easily come up with solutions together.

This activity is great for teams that need assistance in getting started on their problem-solving journey, as it provides an easy and stress-free way to get the creative juices flowing.

Problem Solving Group Activities & Games For Team Building

3. coworker feud, “it’s all fun and games”.

Coworker Feud is a twist on the classic Family Feud game show! This multiple rapid round game keeps the action flowing and the questions going. You can choose from a variety of customizations, including picking the teams yourself, randomized teams, custom themes, and custom rounds.

Best for: Hybrid teams

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Coworker Feud comes with digital game materials, a digital buzzer, an expert host, and a zoom link to get the participants ready for action! Teams compete with each other to correctly answer the survey questions. At the end of the game, the team with the most competitive answers is declared the winner of the Feud.

How to get started:

• Sign up for Coworker Feud
• Break into teams of 4 to 10 people
• Get the competitive juices flowing and let the games begin!

Learn more here: Coworker Feud

4. Crack The Case

“who’s a bad mamma jamma”.

Crack The Case is a classic WhoDoneIt game that forces employees to depend on their collective wit to stop a deadly murderer dead in his tracks! Remote employees and office commuters can join forces to end this crime spree.

Best for: Remote teams

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: The Virtual Clue Murder Mystery is an online problem solving activity that uses a proprietary videoconferencing platform to offer the chance for employees and coworkers to study case files, analyze clues, and race to find the motive, the method, and the individual behind the murder of Neil Davidson.

• Get a custom quote here
• Download the app
• Let the mystery-solving collaboration begin!

Learn more here: Crack The Case

5. Catch Meme If You Can

“can’t touch this”.

Purposefully created to enhance leadership skills and team bonding , Catch Meme If You Can is a hybrid between a scavenger hunt and an escape room . Teammates join together to search for clues, solve riddles, and get out — just in time!

Best for: Small teams

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Catch Meme If You Can is an adventure with a backstory. Each team has to submit their answer to the puzzle in order to continue to the next part of the sequence. May the best team escape!

• The teams will be given instructions and the full storyline
• Teams will be split into a handful of people each
• The moderator will kick off the action!

Learn more here: Catch Meme If You Can

6. Puzzle Games

“just something to puzzle over”.

Puzzle Games is the fresh trivia game to test your employees and blow their minds with puzzles, jokes , and fun facts!

Best for: In-person teams

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Eight mini brain teaser and trivia style games include word puzzles, name that nonsense, name that tune, and much more. Plus, the points each team earns will go towards planting trees in the precious ecosystems and forests of Uganda

• Get a free consultation for your team
• Get a custom designed invitation for your members
• Use the game link
• Dedicated support will help your team enjoy Puzzle Games to the fullest!

Learn more here: Puzzle Games

7. Virtual Code Break

“for virtual teams”.

Virtual Code Break is a virtual team building activity designed for remote participants around the globe. Using a smart video conferencing solution, virtual teams compete against each other to complete challenges, answer trivia questions, and solve brain-busters!

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Virtual Code Break can be played by groups as small as 4 people all the way up to more than 1,000 people at once. However, every team will improve their communication and problem-solving skills as they race against the clock and depend on each other’s strengths to win!

• Reach out for a free consultation to align the needs of your team
• An event facilitator will be assigned to handle all of the set-up and logistics
• They will also provide you with logins and a play-by-play of what to expect
• Sign into the Outback video conferencing platform and join your pre-assigned team
• Lastly, let the games begin!

Learn more here: Virtual Code Break

8. Stranded

“survivor: office edition”.

Stranded is the perfect scenario-based problem solving group activity. The doors of the office are locked and obviously your team can’t just knock them down or break the windows.

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Your team has less than half an hour to choose 10 items around the office that will help them survive. They then rank the items in order of importance. It’s a bit like the classic game of being lost at sea without a lifeboat.

• Get everyone together in the office
• Lock the doors
• Let them start working together to plan their survival

Learn more here: Stranded

9. Letting Go Game

“for conscious healing”.

The Letting Go Game is a game of meditation and mindfulness training for helping teammates thrive under pressure and reduce stress in the process. The tasks of the Letting Go Game boost resiliency, attentiveness, and collaboration.

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Expert-guided activities and awareness exercises encourage team members to think altruistically and demonstrate acts of kindness. Between yoga, face painting, and fun photography, your employees or coworkers will have more than enough to keep them laughing and growing together with this mindfulness activity!

• Reach out for a free consultation
• A guide will then help lead the exercises
• Let the funny videos, pictures, and playing begin!

Learn more here: Letting Go Game

10. Wild Goose Chase

“city time”.

Wild Goose Chase is the creative problem solving activity that will take teams all around your city and bring them together as a group! This scavenger hunt works for teams as small as 10 up to groups of over 5000 people.

Best for: Large teams

Why this is an effective group problem solving activity: As employees and group members are coming back to the office, there are going to be times that they’re itching to get outside. Wild Goose Chase is the perfect excuse to satisfy the desire to go out-of-office every now and then. Plus, having things to look at and see around the city will get employees talking in ways they never have before.

• Download the Outback app to access the Wild Goose Chase
• Take photos and videos from around the city
• The most successful team at completing challenges on time is the champ!

Learn more here: Wild Goose Chase

11. Human Knot

“for a knotty good time”.

The Human Knot is one of the best icebreaker team building activities! In fact, there’s a decent chance you played it in grade school. It’s fun, silly, and best of all — free!

Why this is an effective group problem solving activity: Participants start in a circle and connect hands with two other people in the group to form a human knot. The team then has to work together and focus on clear communication to unravel the human knot by maneuvering their way out of this hands-on conundrum. But there’s a catch — they can’t let go of each other’s hands in this team building exercise.

• Form a circle
• Tell each person to grab a random hand until all hands are holding another
• They can’t hold anyone’s hand who is directly next to them
• Now they have to get to untangling
• If the chain breaks before everyone is untangled, they have to start over again

Learn more here: Human Knot

12. What Would You Do?

“because it’s fun to imagine”.

What Would You Do? Is the hypothetical question game that gets your team talking and brainstorming about what they’d do in a variety of fun, intriguing, and sometimes, whacky scenarios.

Best for: Distributed teams

Why this is an effective group problem solving activity: After employees or coworkers start talking about their What Would You Do? responses, they won’t be able to stop. That’s what makes this such an incredible team building activity . For example, you could ask questions like “If you could live forever, what would you do with your time?” or “If you never had to sleep, what would you do?”

• In addition to hypothetical questions, you could also give teammates some optional answers to get them started
• After that, let them do the talking — then they’ll be laughing and thinking and dreaming, too!

13. Crossing The River

“quite the conundrum”.

Crossing The River is a river-crossing challenge with one correct answer. Your team gets five essential elements — a chicken, a fox, a rowboat, a woman, and a bag of corn. You see, the woman has a bit of a problem, you tell them. She has to get the fox, the bag of corn, and the chicken to the other side of the river as efficiently as possible.

Why this is an effective group problem solving activity: She has a rowboat, but it can only carry her and one other item at a time. She cannot leave the chicken and the fox alone — for obvious reasons. And she can’t leave the chicken with the corn because it will gobble it right up. So the question for your team is how does the woman get all five elements to the other side of the river safely in this fun activity?

• Form teams of 2 to 5 people
• Each team has to solve the imaginary riddle
• Just make sure that each group understands that the rowboat can only carry one animal and one item at a time; the fox and chicken can’t be alone; and the bag of corn and the chicken cannot be left alone
• Give the verbal instructions for getting everything over to the other side

14. End-Hunger Games

“philanthropic fun”.

Does anything bond people quite like acts of kindness and compassion? The End-Hunger Games will get your team to rally around solving the serious problem of hunger.

Best for: Medium-sized teams

Why this is an effective problem solving group activity: Teams join forces to complete challenges based around non-perishable food items in the End-Hunger Games. Groups can range in size from 25 to more than 2000 people, who will all work together to collect food for the local food bank.

• Split into teams and compete to earn boxes and cans of non-perishable food
• Each team attempts to build the most impressive food item construction
• Donate all of the non-perishable foods to a local food bank

Learn more here: End-Hunger Games

People Also Ask These Questions About Team Building Problem Solving Group Activities

Q: what are some problem solving group activities.

• A: Some problem solving group activities can include riddles, egg drop, reverse pyramid, tallest tower, trivia, and other moderator-led activities.

Q: What kind of skills do group problem solving activities & games improve?

• A: Group problem solving activities and games improve collaboration, leadership, and communication skills.

Q: What are problem solving based team building activities & games?

• A: Problem solving based team building activities and games are activities that challenge teams to work together in order to complete them.

Q: What are some fun free problem solving games for groups?

• A: Some fun free problem solving games for groups are kinesthetic puzzles like the human knot game, which you can read more about in this article. You can also use all sorts of random items like whiteboards, straws, building blocks, sticky notes, blindfolds, rubber bands, and legos to invent a game that will get the whole team involved.

Q: How do I choose the most effective problem solving exercise for my team?

• A: The most effective problem solving exercise for your team is one that will challenge them to be their best selves and expand their creative thinking.

Q: How do I know if my group problem solving activity was successful?

• A: In the short-term, you’ll know if your group problem solving activity was successful because your team will bond over it; however, that should also translate to more productivity in the mid to long-term.

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25 best adventure games to get swept up in right now

From Baldur's Gate 3 to Far Cry, the best adventure games are for the daring

The best adventure games out there take us to a myriad of different virtual worlds and introduce us to a host of memorable characters and scenarios. From fantasy  realms to post-apocalyptic landscapes and space-faring locales, there's no shortage of great journeys to set out on across various genres. With some of the best game stories to experience, the best adventure games are often offer up plenty of exploration, unexpected surprises, and action, whether it be traversing across the Wild West, discovering the tale of a family home, or getting swept up in the realms of Norse mythology, this list showcases just how much is on offer for anyone looking for a new adventure to dive into. 

With some of the best-single player games and best co-op games among our selection, there's something for everyone, with picks across multiple platforms. While we certainly have plenty to look forward to when it comes to all of the new games for 2024 on the horizon, read on below to find the best adventure games you can play right now. 

Recent updates

Our list of the best adventure games was updated on March 22. We have nothing more to add right now, but we've made sure that all our recommendations below still deserve their spots.

25. Fallout 4

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One 

Now may not seem like the ideal time to revisit a post-apocalyptic landscape that has reduced former major cities to ghost towns but, hey, what better way is there to adjust to the desertion of the outside world? Fallout 4 may be bleak at times, what with the whole nuclear devastation and that, but it ultimately presents us with lands to explore that are rich in detail, populated by unforgettable characters - robot detectives! Ghoulified radio lovers! -, and ripe for the chance to build your own community on. While you wander through the scorched remains of a society devastated by an invisible enemy (in the form of radiation).

24. A Way Out

Developer: Hazelight Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One

If single-player adventures aren’t for you, not to worry - A Way Out is here to ensure that those that favour split-screen offerings still get the chance to engage in the high-stakes campaigns that solo players often get to sink their teeth into. Opening in a prison in the 1970s, A Way Out urges a player and their partner to work together effectively to plot their escape from incarceration. It’s an inventive set-up, in which players must work with one another smartly if they are to make any kind of progress - at some point, one player will have to create a distraction so that the other can pick up an object that will aid them in their escape plan. By the end of the game, the two players helping the protagonists Leo and Vincent to go on the run will become as close as the characters they’re controlling and may even shed a tear or two as the story nears its conclusion.

23. Starfield

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X

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If exploring the galaxy is your idea of a good time, you've probably at least heard of Starfield already. Bethesda's sprawling deep space RPG is a lot more than an open world adventure: it's an intergalactic one, and that means the sky's no limit at all. With skip customization, a range of unique character backgrounds to choose from, and of course no shortage of winding journeys to take among the stars, Starfield is a veritable adventure playground.

22. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Developer: Insomniac Games Platform: PS5

One of the finest duos to ever grace the gaming world, there are few pairs you’ll spend a better time with than this particular Lombax and his robot pal. The plot at heart is simple enough - our unlikely twosome travel from planet to planet in an attempt to keep the galaxy safe from the egotists that threaten it. With plenty of laughs, puzzles to solve, and hoverboard races to take part in, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart 's heroes serve as two of the most easily entertaining characters out there and joining them on their missions never once involves a dull moment.

21. Far Cry 4

Developer: Ubisoft Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One  

The Far Cry series has always excelled at creating eccentric, deeply unhinged villains and this fourth offering is no exception. In fact, Far Cry 4 may contain the greatest antagonist these games have ever seen: I mean, how could anyone forget Pagan Min? The flamboyant lover of colourful suits may have been the head of a brutal tyranny but, boy, did he have one-liners to spare. In your quest to free the fictional Himalayan country of Kyrat, you come across Min time and time again while you team up with rebel forces and ride elephants to your heart’s content. You’ll be hard pressed to find another villain quite as fun as Min in your other adventures, that much I can promise.

20. The Wolf Among Us

Developer: Telltale Games Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Android, iOS

This 2014 cult hit from Telltale took classic fairytale characters, reimagined them in a hidden town in 1980s New York and then dropped them all into the mix of a murder investigation that the player leads. As the reformed Big Bad Wolf, you get to lead the search for the murderer like the kind of gruff detective you’d find in early 2000s TV shows; only in this case, the suspects and aides are all familiar fairytale folk. In episodic installments, you are tasked with unravelling the mystery of the killings that are taking place in Fabletown and, soon enough, the whole fabric of this strange community starts to fall apart. The Wolf Among Us is an oddity that you won’t forget in a hurry, so head on into Fabletown and enjoy the topsy turvy nature of it all.

19. Hogwarts Legacy

Developer: Avalanche Software Platforms: PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One

Potterheads unite! Hogwarts Legacy is a sprawling fantasy RPG that plants you in the shoes of a fifth-year student at the iconic wizarding school, but there's a lot more to it than slinging spells and feeding hippogriffs. One aspect that the game truly excels in is its stunning world-building. The huge map comprises not only Hogwarts and neighbouring village Hogsmeade, but plenty of smaller hamlets, creature dens, and enemy encampments hidden amid the thick overgrowth of forest. You'll want to spend hours soaring over tranquil coastlines before hopping off your broom to puzzle through a Merlin trial; just don't forget to complete those assignments, too. 

18. Gone Home

Developer: Fullbright Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS

If you like your adventures with just a touch of tragedy and a thoughtful look at issues concerning gender and sexuality, then Gone Home is the indie title you should be exploring. It may not involve the use of heavy weaponry the way the other entries on this list do and it may not take you across sweeping lands, but it does invite you to seek out a gripping and bittersweet story of one girl’s reason for fleeing her family home. Told through the lens of a young woman in search of her sister, Gone Home is devised of wandering through a big, empty house and slowly combing through clues to what has unfolded here. It may not sound like an adventure in the traditional sense but it is certainly fascinating enough to keep you as entertained as the aforementioned big budget games do.

17. Bioshock Infinite

Developer: Irrational Games Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

If you weren’t satisfied with knocking several rounds out of a crazed tyrant in Far Cry 5, try Bioshock Infinite on for size. In a dramatic change of scenery from the first two Bioshock games, Infinite takes you sky high (literally) by thrusting you, as the fantastically named Booker DeWitt, into Columbia - a floating city ruled by a figure that fancies himself as a God. Like all Bioshock entries, Infinite is notable for its creepy atmosphere (even with a new, bright colour palette that serves as the complete opposite to its predecessors) and ability to scare the absolute crap out of players even when all seems calm. Don’t question the complexities of the varying timelines you come across, just trust those creepy twins.

16. Guardians of the Galaxy

Developer: Eidos Montreal Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch In this brilliantly entertaining and humor-filled adventure, you take on the role of Star-Lord as you set out across the galaxy with your rag-tag team. Filled with action and plenty of surprises along the way, you'll find yourself wrapped up in quest to save the day against an intergalactic threat - all in a day's work, right? With a loveable cast of characters that form up your crew, each member will offer something different in the story, including fighting styles when you enter into combat. From chatting with your misfit crew aboard the Milano to landing on strange alien planets, Guardians of the Galaxy takes you on an uproarious ride you won't want to miss. 

15. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Developer: Respawn Entertainment Platforms: PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One

  Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is one of the best Star Wars games for good reason. Cal is back, the young Jedi at odds with the Galactic Empire, and this time he's brought friends. With five different lightsaber types and the option between a single or double-blade, wielding the Force has never looked snazzier. And were would be be without an old-fashioned blaster? Expect memorable characters and a stunning story to boot when you load into Jedi Survivor the first time, just two reasons why we deem it one of the best action-adventure games ever.

Developer: BlueTwelve Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4

Stray takes you on one pawsome adventure as a little cat who, after getting lost, must find their way through a neon-tinted cybercity inhabited by robots. Along the way, you'll meet a little robot called B12 who accompanies you as you run along the streets, climb up buildings, and paw at paint cans to find your way through. With plenty of mysteries wrapped up in its world, you'll puzzle your way through the city and experience everything from the perspective a fluffy. From pawing at paint cans to known them over, to curling up for a snooze, and scratching at rugs, you'll get to do all the things a cat would do as you explore. Oh, and there's a dedicated meow-button, of course. 

13. Until Dawn

Developer: Supermassive Games Platform(s): PS4

Often billed as one of the most inventive survival horror games around, this 2015 hit from Supermassive Games is the story of one night spent in the snowy Blackwood Mountains, where you switch in and out of playing as eight different characters; all of whom must band together to escape from the varying, mysterious terrors crashing their winter gathering. The gameplay in Until Dawn is mostly made of quicktime events and, much like in Life is Strange, the butterfly effect is employed throughout the story to ensure that the player is constantly aware of the consequences of their rash actions - something which raises the stakes of the game and makes for a much more intriguing trawl through the woods than your usual horror fare. When isolation stops you from spending an actual night cooped up with friends somewhere, why not do it in Until Dawn, instead? Minus the Wendigos, obviously.

12. Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

Developer: Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

There is, perhaps, nothing more satisfying than taking down hordes of Nazis over and over again while also fusing your body with a souped-up supersuit. And you can quote me on that. Assuming the role once again of BJ Blazkowicz in this umpteenth entry in the legendary series, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus might be the only game ever to feature an entire sequence in which you come face to face with Adolf Hitler on Venus. Yes, that really does happen. Wolfenstein places you right in the belly of the beast (that is to say, a Nazi-occupied America) and lets you unleash hell on anyone that stands in the way of liberation. The New Colossus is not only a whole heap of absurd fun but also packs in plenty of inspired characters and moments of equal hilarity and even tenderness. All in all, it’s a (literal) blast.

11. Assassin's Creed Valhalla

Developer: Ubisoft Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One

Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes you on a sprawling adventure as Viking newly arrived in England. As Eivor, you'll be raiding for riches, growing your settlement, and journeying out into the vast open-world to uncover all of its secrets. With a main story arc and plenty of side quests to keep you busy, there's no shortage of adventures to experience with an axe in hand. And with so much to see and explore in the base game, there's also a host of new DLC additions and updates to keep you busy for a long time yet. Leaning into the RPG side of the series more than ever, you'll also get to decide what actions to take as you progress. 

10. Life is Strange

Developer: Dontnod Platform(s): PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One 

Life is Strange takes you on a journey through an extraordinary period of time in a teenage girl’s life, filled with moments where the choices you make are bound to have an unchangeable impact on the future. Set in a small town - a site which serves as a tentative and delicate exploration of identity - Life is Strange sees the protagonist Max rewind time, and forge and lose friendships in an attempt to solve the mystery that is engulfing her home of Arcadia Bay. With expert storytelling and emotional intelligence both on display at all times here, Life is Strange is the perfect adventure for anyone in search of poignancy. And thanks to the remastered collection, you can experience the game that started the series with improved graphics. 

9. Telltale's The Walking Dead

Developer: Telltale Games Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Arguably the jewel in Telltale’s crown, this take on the seemingly eternal comic book series is fraught with emotional devastation, sensitivity and near-on impossible choices to make; all while battling off hordes of walkers. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because The Walking Dead is deeply rooted in emotion that it isn’t also a dynamic and often terrifying slice of action. You’ll have to fend off the creatures clawing at your flesh just as much as you’ll have to make difficult and strategic decisions. If you’re looking for a real distraction in lockdown, look to this test of morals nestled in an unassuming zombie game you might otherwise overlook.

8. Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection

Developer: Naughty Dog Platform(s): PS4

Is it even possible to have a discussion of the great adventure games without mentioning Nathan Drake’s name at least once? In Naughty Dog’s definitive series, you get to step into the old journeyman’s boots of Nathan - treasure hunter extraordinaire and all-round charming Indiana Jones type, with his own fascinating backstory to boot (if you can excuse the pun). Across four installments, Nathan travels across the globe along with fellow ragtags in search of artefacts, truth and glories galore. Filled with puzzles, shoot-outs and plenty of stealth for those that prefer sneaking their way through decaying ruins, Uncharted is infinite in the joys it provides for anyone wondering if X really does mark the spot with all the spare time they have at home now.

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

Skyrim is one adventure many keep coming back to since it was first released over a decade ago, and with good reason. While it's partly thanks to the fact that Skyrim has landed on so many platforms over the years, it's also mainly because it serves up a rich world where you have your own adventures. As the Dragonborn the main campaign will keep you plenty busy, but the expansive world is ripe for all kinds of escapades to boot; with many secrets, side quests, and encounters to discover in Tamriel. With the release on new-consoles and an update that introduces fishing, there's never been a better time to step in the world of Skyrim - whether you're revisiting it or experiencing it for the first time. 

6. The Last of Us

Developer: Naughty Dog Platform(s): PS4 

It is difficult to decide what to classify The Last of Us as. Part searing tale of humanity, part classic tragedy and part terrifying test of survival; the story of Joel, Ellie and their journey through a desolate America provides some of the most moving moments in gaming history and is surely one of the greatest adventures there is. Though they are not in search of hidden treasure but, rather, a life away from the infected that roam the overgrown streets, Joel and Ellie are no less adventurers than Naughty Dog’s other lauded heroes, like Nathan Drake. Consisting of gameplay that often sees you counting your bullets and making ‘em count, staying hidden from those infamous “clickers” and wandering through the ruins of former American states, The Last of Us is an incredibly well-paced and structured piece of work - just don’t be afraid to have a cry every now and then.

5. Baldur's Gate 3

Developer: Larian Studios Platforms: PC, PS5

Widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of recent years, Baldur's Gate 3 is a winding adventure through the D&D universe. Set on the Sword Coast and spanning three stunning acts, the main campaign of BG3 is one fraught with magic, danger, and no shortage of mesmerising characters to meet along the way. In true tabletop fashion, BG3's combat is turn based - but don't let that put you off. Exploring is as easy as clicking on items, spots on the ground, or NPCs to converse with, and with fully-motion captured dialogue animations, there's something universally yet uniquely charming about Baldur's Gate 3.

4. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Developer: CD Projekt Red Platform(s): PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Sometimes you need a companion in your gaming whose humour is sardonic enough to keep you entertained. Enter Geralt the Witcher, who brings with him in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt one of the most wide-reaching and versatile adventures ever seen, as you inadvertently end up caught in a battle between empires for control and even solve a few murder mysteries involving elves and werewolves in the search for your adoptive daughter across a vast and unforgiving terrain. The many quests of Geralt of Rivia are plentiful and emotional enough that no gamer could want for anything once they pick up a controller and put on his Witcher’s medallion.

3. God of War

Developer: Santa Monica Studio Platform(s ): PC, PS4 

Anyone that owned a console back in 2005 surely remembers the trials and tribulations of Kratos, the infamous Spartan god and harbinger of destruction in the ancient world, no? Even if you didn’t play the original God of War series, the reboot made for the PS4 in 2018 is brilliant. In a touching story centred around father and son, you assume the role of Kratos in what initially appears to be an unassuming journey to scatter the ashes of his late wife (and his son’s mother) and soon end up embroiled in the wrath of Odin, the whispers of the World Serpent and the stories of all sorts of other mythical figures. Both an enthralling adventure and a tender study of the sacrifices we make for family, God of War is as thrilling as it is tear-jerking. 

2. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

Developer: Insomniac Games Platform(s): PS5 

The first Marvel’s Spider-Man was hard to top, but incredibly, Insomniac pulled it off in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 . There are no bubbling volcanoes, arid deserts, or vast oceans to conquer, but the streets of downtown Manhattan prove perilous enough. The snag is that Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a PS5-exclusive, making it a bit less accessible to those of us without Sony 's latest console. 

Not only is it one of the best adventure games you can play right now, it's arguably one of the best PS5 games yet. It has everything a Peter Parker fan could want: dynamic swinging mechanics for traversing New York, skilful combat against tremendous (and familiar) foes, and even a spot of GTA 5 -style character swapping for good measure when you want to step into the shoes of Miles Morales. The city is a bustling jungle that's yours to explore, filled with side-quests and collectibles to keep you busy between main missions. The action-adventure elements balance each other out so perfectly, there's a reason our Features Editor Joe Donnelly says it's "quite simply the best superhero game yet" in his Marvel's Spider-Man 2 review .

1. Red Dead Redemption 2

Developer: Rockstar Platform(s): PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One

In one of the most ambitious and sprawling games in recent memory, you can strap on outlaw Arthur Morgan’s stirrups and spend hour after hour journeying through the last days of the Western frontier in the company of your trusty horse and a few old friends. In this prequel to the much-loved Red Dead Redemption, weirdly named Red Dead Redemption 2 , you find yourself playing as a member of Dutch van der Linde’s legendary gang, alongside a younger version of the original, legendary Red Dead protagonist John Marston, and are able to ride freely across a great American landscape. You are faced with either taking the path of the honourable man as the era of the Wild West approaches its death or spending your days being as terrible an outlaw can be - the choice is yours as you lasso your way through one adventure to the next. 

For more sprawling tales of intrigue and adventure, check out our pick of the best RPG games you can play right now. 

Hannah Ryan started her time at GamesRadar+ as an intern, writing news and features for the site. However, Hannah is now a freelance digital programmer and trending news writer at CNN, contributing to the news programming and curating the day's breaking stories for the digital homepage. Hannah has a MA Magazine Journalism and has years of experience in broadcasting and production through her time working as a presenter for the Xpress radio station. 

• Jasmine Gould-Wilson Staff Writer, GamesRadar+
• Heather Wald Senior staff writer

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• Math Quest - A Problem Solving Adventure

• Guess and check
• Look for a pattern
• Work backward
• Make a picture or a diagram
• Use Logical Reasoning
• Make a table or a chart

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11 comments.

Would you play everyday, once a week, or what? Love the idea of the game but I'm curious how this would fit in with your "regular plans". Thanks!

Hi Ricky! I've done it a few different ways.: 1. 30 minutes a day of our 90 minute math block 2. Once a week for 45 minutes. 3. As a center activity in our math rotations Math Quest is also a great anchor activity! Students who finish early can always grab their problem solving packets and be meaningfully (and happily!) engaged. Does this help? Let me know if you have any other questions! Christy

I can't find the problem solving mat, rubric or any math quest stuff. I clicked on the links and they took me to your TPT store but I can't identify which product would have these things in.

Hi Lynda, Thank you for your interest! I've updated the links, so they should take you to the correct resource now. It is called "Problem Solving Mats and Rubrics." Please let me know if you have any other questions. :-) Christy

I love this game and play it in my class also, Thank you for the added problem solving mat I can't wait to make the change. I think I am going to play again at the end of the year and have the students make fate cards too.

I'm so happy to hear from someone who also uses and loves Math Quest! Thanks for your comment! Let me know how it goes with the problem solving mat. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks for sharing your problem solving mat and rubric! I am excited to try them with my students this year. I have a question about your problem solving mat and rubric that has to do with a product that I am putting on Teachers Pay Teachers. Would you mind e-mailing me at [email protected]? Fantastically Fourth Grade

I checked out Math Quest online via your link and it says it's for 4-7th grade and the CCSS links are for those grades as well. I teach 3rd grade so I was disappointed as I thought I could use this with my 3rd graders and have the push for my high students. What do you think?

Hi There! Thanks for your question! I have used Math Quest with my high ability 3rd graders for past few years and have found it to be a great match! At times I will supplement or tier activities with word problems from the "Problem Solvers Series." Problem Solvers focuses on the same problem solving strategies as Math Quest, but provides individual books for grades 1-6. Here's a link to the series, if you're interested: http://www.mheducation.ca/school/schoolGraphics/creative_cat2005_problem_solving.pdf I am out of the building this week for a conference, but when I return to school on Monday I will look more closely at the problems included Math Quest and share further feedback with you. If you have other questions in the meantime, please let me know! Thanks again for being in touch! Christy

thanks for this share, Escape Rooms

I use this game with our gifted/talented program gr 3 students. THey love it and beg to play it in 4th and 5th!

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27 Best Puzzle Games for Xbox Series X / S

It is amazing to see how much the Puzzle genre has grown since its inception. Initially, the games were simply akin to a jigsaw puzzle. Players had to move around pieces until they arrived at the end of the level.

Nowadays, there really is no limit to how in-depth and complicated puzzle games can be. Some of them still adhere to the older style but add in new elements, while others utilize concepts such as physics.

As a genre itself, puzzle games are now quite broad. Games based around trivia are also puzzle games, as are shooters that require you to solve riddles or push around levers in a level to clear it. The one thing that is clear is that those who love a brain teaser have a wealth of content to try out.

Here, we list the 27 best puzzle games for Xbox Series X / S. Our list does not restrict the genre on any grounds. As long as the game has features that require you to extensively utilize your brain and the game is good enough, it makes our list.

We begin our list with perhaps the most popular and most obvious choice: Portal 2. Apart from Half-Life and the Counter-Strike franchise, Portal is the game that Valve is the most famous for.

Portal pits you against a powerful AI in the future. Your job is to make use of a portal device and win against the AI. The portal device can be used to transport from one place to another, which is what you will be using to solve most of the puzzles in the game.

What we love about Portal 2 is that it manages to strike the perfect level of difficulty. Virtually all of the game is quite hard and will require you to spend time on the puzzles. However, any person of the appropriate age should not have a problem eventually getting through it.

At the very least, Portal 2 will be a learning experience, which is why it made our list of the best educational games for Xbox .

There is also a co-op mode where two players work together to solve the puzzles. This mode is as intricate and as difficult as the single-player one. Even the visuals do not look too bad despite the game having come out in 2011.

What Remains of Edith Finch

What Remains of Edith Finch manages to be fairly creepy without being too scary for children. The developers claim that the game is meant to represent just how tiny we are when compared to the universe.

Your name is Edith Finch, and your family resides in Washington. Finding the house empty and all of your family dead, you now need to traverse through the massive house and try to figure out what happened to the members of your family.

The house is full of individual stories where you get to control a family member of yours. All the stories are different and played from that person’s point of view. They begin on the day of the person’s death and end when that person’s life comes to a close.

Slowly but surely, you will get to piece together how you ended up where you currently are. That is when you will discover if there is something that ties the disappearance of your family, or whether they were just a random set of events.

Oxenfree does a great job of taking a strange concept and making sure that it is portrayed in a way that makes the player resonate with the characters.

After a ghostly rift is opened on an island, you will need to solve various puzzles and deal with a multitude of problems in order to save yourself and your peers.

The way you deal with every problem will have an impact on the future of the game. As such, making one wrong decision can have profound consequences on how the story turns out. Speaking of which, the story is one of the main reasons to play Oxenfree.

During the narrative, a lot of decisions you make will have a huge impact on some of the characters. This is because the story is designed to toy with your emotions as you witness the lives of all the characters change. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse.

Life is Strange

Life is Strange follows the story of Max and Chloe. Once Max learns how to turn back time, she realizes that she can use this to do a lot of good. However, she soon learns that turning back time has consequences of its own.

Life is Strange is a five-episode series that has you make numerous decisions, all of which change the outcome of the story in one way or the other. During this time, there is some light puzzle-solving along the way, but the mean reason to play the game is once again its story.

What the game must be commended for is its relaxed nature (helped by its soundtrack). Since you have the ability to turn back time, you simply cannot fail. All you need to do once you make a mistake is to go back in time and fix what you did. Just remember that this feature does not work at certain key moments of the game.

There is also Life is Strange 2. However, do remember that it is a brand new story and has not received nearly as much praise as the original. Life is Strange was on our list of the best interactive story games for Xbox .

From the creators of LIMBO, INSIDE takes the same formula, tweaks it a little bit, and brings a brand new adventure that can only be described as better than the original.

The game is a puzzle platformer that gives you very little to go on with at the beginning. Almost everything is left for you to figure out by yourself. This, coupled with the ambient soundtrack and eerie visuals, make for a fairly creepy experience.

Despite that, INSIDE is not a game that will scare you in any major way. It is a game that even children should be able to play without any problems. This is one of the reasons why it made our list of the best side-scrolling games for Xbox .

A Plague Tale: Innocence

A Plague Tale puts you in the shoes of Amicia. Set during the Inquisition, you need to make sure that you manage to avoid the inquisition soldiers and protect yourself and your brother.

Apart from the soldiers who are trying to hunt you, there is also a plague going on. With thousands of rats scouring the city for victims, you will need to avoid everyone and everything around you until you and Hugo can get to safety.

A Plague Tale is more about running away from threats. However, there is a lot of light puzzle-solving that will be necessary in order for you and Hugo to get out of a tight spot. Just remember that this is not a co-op game. Despite there being two characters, you only get to control Amicia, and while Hugo can be ordered around, he is an NPC.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition

The Stanley Parable is an extremely fun game that gives you more options in its short-lived campaign than any other game. Nothing is known in this game, and the only thing that you can be sure of is that there is a voice guiding you through an office building.

Does the voice want what’s best for you? Or is it just out there to make a spectacle of your existence? This is something you can only find out as you near the end of the game. With a lot of endings, easter eggs, and decisions, it will take a while before you have explored everything that The Stanley Parable has to offer.

Little Nightmares 2

Little Nightmares 2 is the sequel to the almost equally amazing Little Nightmares. Those who like the idea of the game should try the first part before they try this. That said, it is obvious that the sequel is the better game of the two.

Little Nightmares 2 has the player play the role of Mono, a boy who has been trapped in a dream-like world. Now, he needs to navigate through this dreary world with the help of his guide, known as Six.

The setting of the game is quite similar to that of INSIDE. The major difference arises from there being two characters instead of one. Just remember that once again, this is a totally single-player experience.

The Talos Principle

The Talos Principle is a first-person game where you play as an Artificial Intelligence robot that is playing in a simulation.

The world is in ruins, and it seems that it is only getting worse. In order to understand what is going on, who you are, and what intelligence truly means, you will need to solve a bunch of puzzles.

The story here plays an important part. The Talos Principle is a game that can truly be described as intellectual. It poses deep questions about what it means to be human, and whether AI can ever be as competent or as sentient.

It Takes Two

It Takes Two is developed by Hazelight, a studio that is known for developing co-op games and developing them really well.

It Takes Two is one of the best works by the studio. It puts you in the shoes of Code or May, two people who have been turned into dolls. Now, they need to find a way to turn themselves back.

The game can only be played in co-op mode. This is because a lot of the puzzles in the game are challenging and are impossible to complete by a single person. Since Code and May are in a relationship, this is an ideal game for couples too, and it was on our list of the best Xbox games for couples .

Lastly, remember that you do not need to purchase two copies of the game to play with someone else. You get a Friends Pass with your copy, which can be shared with someone else to play the game.

The Turing Test

The Turing Test is a game that is quite similar to The Talos Principle. This is a game that explores the bounds of human consciousness and whether or not there is something about human intuition that separates it from robots.

You play the role of Ava Turing. You are tasked with discovering what is aboard the Europa. As you go through it, you will need to solve a lot of puzzles. The interesting fact about all of these puzzles is that it is impossible for a robot to solve them.

Going through each of those puzzles gives you a startling idea of what it means to be human. With a shockingly terrifying yet interesting story, The Turing Test is the ideal game to play once you are done with The Talos Principle.

Psychonauts 2

One unfortunate thing about puzzle games is that they tend to lack a bit of action. If you are a fan of puzzle games, chances are that you will have to avoid games that involve a lot of fighting and vice versa.

This does not hold true for Psychonauts 2. In the game, you play the role of a young psychic known as Raz. Joining the Psychonauts has been his lifelong dream, and you will guide him now that he has achieved it. Simply put, there is an evil super-villain out there that Raz has to defeat now that he is a part of the Psychonauts.

Along the way, you will face both challenging enemies that will need to be taken care of and puzzles that will need to be solved. In order to solve them, you will need to make full use of Raz’s psychic and acrobatic abilities.

Tacoma is the next game on our list of the best Xbox puzzle games. It seems that AI is quite a common theme in the modern puzzle genre. Tacoma is set in the year 2088 on a space station. Since the crew has disappeared, you now need to figure out what to happen.

There was a high-quality surveillance system aboard the ship. You need to make use of that to take a look at how the crew lived and what happened in their final days. If you are looking for a puzzle game that is immensely focused on its story, Tacoma is a great place to begin.

Just remember that Tacoma plays more like a mystery game rather than a puzzle game. While there is light puzzle-solving throughout the narrative, you will primarily be dealing with the one big puzzle that is apparent: What happened on Tacoma?

Q.U.B.E 2 is a sequel that improves on the original in almost every way. While the original game was a bit hit or miss when it came to the puzzles, Q.U.B.E 2 does not have that problem in the slightest.

You play the role of an archaeologist who has been stranded on an alien landscape. The goal is for you to find a way back home.

Not knowing anything about the place, you must rely on one other survivor who will help you on your journey. You have a suit that grants you additional powers, but you have no memory of how you got it.

With over 80 unique puzzles to solve, each puzzle will not only bring you closer to home but also make sure that you get to know a little more about the reason why you are here.

Portal: Still Alive

We began our list with Portal 2, a game that is considered by many to be the best puzzle game of all time. The original Portal is still available to play, and it is almost just as amazing as the sequel.

Portal: Still Alive is fundamentally still the same game. You use portal technology to solve various puzzles and get to the end of the level. This game should help you discover some of the original thought processes behind the Portal technology and help put into perspective why you undertook some of the actions in Portal 2.

The Still Alive version of the game adds 14 new levels that were not available in the original. Unfortunately, there is no co-op mode here. The visuals are also outdated due to the age of the game. Despite that, this is a hard game to put down.

Surviving the Aftermath

Surviving the Aftermath is not exactly a puzzle game. However, we want to have some variety on our list of the best Xbox puzzle games.

Surviving the Aftermath puts you in charge of a post-apocalyptic colony. You have to make sure that the colony is not impacted by any disasters. This will require a lot of complicated calculations and management of your resources.

The fun thing about Surviving the Aftermath is that even though the apocalypse has already happened once, it could happen again. In order to find out if it will, you need to investigate, and then come up with a way to stop it if you can.

The Witness

In The Witness, you wake up on a strange island, not knowing where you were and why you are here.

On the island, you will find a series of individual puzzles that you will need to solve. There are over 500 puzzles in the game, each of them providing a little more information about why you are on the island.

We understand that this is a concept quite popular in puzzle games. In fact, many of the games on this list have used a similar story. That said, The Witness has one of the most unique art styles with some of the most poppy color schemes you can imagine.

The Witness must also be commended for the complexity of the puzzles. Almost no two puzzles are the same. Each one introduces something new into the mix, keeping the game fresh throughout the 500 puzzles.

Human Fall Flat

If you are looking to play a game that is both inquisitive, whacky, and can be enjoyed with friends, Human Fall Flat is perfect.

The game is a platformer. It gives you the start line and the finish line, but how you get between the two is up to you. Each of the levels has a number of secrets that can be discovered. Some of them are still being discovered all of these years later.

The game can be played with one other player locally or up to eight players online. The developers keep on adding new levels periodically. However, that is not even needed, as no two playthroughs of the game are going to be the same.

Discovering new ways to get to the end is always fun, and mastering the mechanics of a difficult move is even better. Out of all the games here, we would say this is the best for a large group of friends to play together.

The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is a sci-fi RPG that has you fight a bunch of factions all vying for control in a galaxy far away.

The game has good shooting mechanics and there are a bunch of areas for you to explore. However, that is not why we have included it on our list of the best puzzle games for Xbox Series X and S.

Throughout The Outer Worlds, there are numerous mini-games where you get to solve puzzles. While they are few and far between, all of them are very well-designed and should be great fun for any puzzle enthusiast.

If you are looking to solve a few puzzles but also blow some alien heads, you should give The Outer Worlds a try. Just remember that there is no co-op or multiplayer.

This game takes you through a weird testing facility where you have to try out a brand new invention known as the ChromaGun.

The ChromaGun is a military-grade weapon that can be used to change the colors of the objects around you. In the testing facility, it will be used on various walls and robots (known as the WorkerDroids) in order to progress to the next level.

This concept is unique enough that even hardcore fans of the puzzle genre will find something new here. The only negative aspect of the game is that it is too short. Only a handful of hours are required to complete all the puzzles, and there is nothing to do once you have done that.

Evergate is a puzzle platformer in which you have to guide a soul to the afterlife. Your character wields a Soulflame, which can be used to hit crystals and unleash their energy.

Despite its dark themes, Evergate is a very happy and upbeat game. You can experiment with various crystals to see how they interact. They can then be used to solve some of the puzzles in the game.

It is possible to control the speed of time through the Soulflame. The game will also have you relive the memories of your past life as you move forward. Evergate isn’t too big on its story, but there is enough of it to give all the puzzles you solve a greater meaning.

As the name would suggest, FROGUN is a game where you have a frog-shaped gun. Rather, the gun is like a grappling hook that can be used to deal with enemies and move from place to place.

The game clearly has a Super Mario vibe to it. Not only do the characters of the two games look similar, but many of the assets are also similar.

You play the role of Renata. After your parents leave you to go on an expedition, you get bored and decide to follow them. You take with you the newest invention of your parents: The FROGUN. You also discover that your parents are in grave danger and you are the only one who can help them.

Using this weapon, it will be up to you to rescue your parents from wherever they are being held captive.

FAR: Changing Tides

FAR: Changing Tides is another one of those games that are not completely based on solving puzzles. However, it will require you to use a lot of your brain. What’s more, it has a very compelling story that is bound to make you emotional at some point.

When the entire world gets flooded, you enter your ship with the aim of finding yourself a new home. With absolutely no one and nothing to look forward to, you will need to roam the endless tides to find a place where maybe, just maybe, you can live happily.

With the ambient sounds of the ocean flooding in your ears, you will need to captain your ship and solve a plethora of puzzles in order to get from one place to the next.

Unravel Two

Unravel Two is primarily an adventure game. However, it also has a lot of puzzles that need to be solved if you are to progress to the end. At the beginning of Unravel Two, you get to create your own character (Yarny).

You can then take this Yarny and begin your adventure. You will have to deal with a lot of other Yarnys and monsters. You can make friends, enemies, and everything in between as you look for friendship and support in this strange world.

The game can also be played in co-op with one other person. Just remember that the co-op can only be played locally.

Telltale The Walking Dead Series

Pretty much all of the Telltale games follow a similar formula. Most of the games revolve around you making certain choices, usually through a dialogue. The next game on our list of the best Xbox puzzle games is The Walking Dead Series by Telltale.

These choices then lead to consequences that you have to deal with. All of the games work like this, but each of them has a unique storyline. Apart from the decisions that you need to make, there are also a few puzzles that you need to solve along the way.

The entire Walking Dead series has puzzles like this. Set inside The Walking Dead universe, you play the role of various characters and witness events that are happening at the same time as the main TV series. If you enjoyed watching The Walking Dead, then you will enjoy playing The Walking Dead games.

In terms of its story, there might be no other game that stands out as much as Sheepo. We do not mean that the story is particularly good. It is fine, but not that great. Rather, we mean the idea behind the game.

You are an entity that somewhat resembles a sheep. Your mission is to go on different planets in the universe and catalog every single species that exists in the universe.

To do this, you will need to platform your way across the terrain of extremely strange and daunting planets. You will also need to solve various puzzles in order to get out of whatever problem you are in.

With no combat, Sheepo is a game that relies on movement, puzzle-solving, and exploration. Just like its story, some of the characters that you will meet will be full of their own wild intricacies and will help make the experience somehow seem even more bizarre.

Submerged: Hidden Depths

Submerged: Hidden Depths is the last game on our list of the best puzzle games for Xbox Series X / S.

The game is about exploring the ruins of a world that has been destroyed and lost under the sea. There isn’t a lot to do in the game, and the main purpose behind it is to relax and take your time as you try to find out what happened to the city, and whether there is anything you can do to rebuild it.

It is quite a shame that Hidden Depths does not have a multiplayer or co-op mode, because it would have been great to explore the world with other people, especially because of the game’s family-friendly nature.

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Lorelei And The Laser Eyes : The Kotaku Review

You will never be able to stop thinking about Lorelei and the Laser Eyes . The latest game from developer Simogo, the team behind 2019’s Sayonara Wild Hearts and 2013’s buzzy, puzzly adventure game Device 6 , will burn itself into your mind. That remains true even when you aren’t actively playing it, and continues long after you’ve solved its final puzzle.

Allow me to illustrate what I am saying the way the game would:

Int. NYC Apartment, Saturday Morning:

WOMAN makes coffee, while FIANCÉE eats breakfast

WOMAN (suddenly):

What if the key to opening [redacted] is using the [redacted]

And then matching it to the [redacted]! Let’s go.

Five hours of gameplay followed. I can’t quite remember if I ever had coffee that morning.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a puzzle game unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Swedish developer Simogo, which has been innovating in the genre since at least 2013’s Year Walk , has crafted an immaculate interactive mystery dripping with style, rich with an enthralling story to unravel, and chock full of masterfully designed puzzles to obsess over. The game’s logic-heavy mechanics will immediately draw parallels to Lucas Pope’s seminal Return of the Obra Dinn . But just as that game’s innovations and influence made it a common point of reference for critics when reviewing games that followed, I can only assume we will start seeing critics drawing comparisons to Lorelei in much the same way. Simogo’s accomplishment is a step forward for not only the puzzle genre but video games as a whole.

Every good story, regardless of the medium, needs a good hook. It’s the thing that draws the audience in for the rest of the tale. Oftentimes the best hook is a simple question. In Lorelei and the Laser Eyes , that hook is a handful of questions: Who are you? Where are you? What are you doing here? Did I suddenly develop amnesia? Your goal is to find the truth to all these questions and more in a twisting narrative touching on the nature of art and its spectators. Grab a pen and paper, you’re going to need it.

Much of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is hard to put into words. It’s a visual and mechanical feast for the senses. But here are the facts as I know them. The game takes place at a seemingly abandoned hotel and its surrounding grounds. The year is… well, that is a little harder to answer. Time is malleable within Lorelei and the Laser Eyes . While the hotel remains constant, the people and events within it seem to shift between decades and even centuries. But all of these realities live within the same physical space at once. The closest comparison I can make is to Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia , in which two stories in different time periods play out in parallel on the same stage, nearly interacting with each other at all times. It’s discombobulating but purposefully puts you in a particular mindset. Things here defy easy explanations, so look beyond what your two eyes see.

Unraveling these questions requires progressing through the hotel’s many rooms, all of which are locked behind a series of exceedingly complex puzzles in a mazelike structure. Mazes are a running theme, and you’ll have to navigate a few of them in Lorelei and The Laser Eyes . While there are some padlocks and safe combinations you must crack, progressing is rarely that simple. To describe the puzzles you encounter in detail would ruin much of the fun, so I won’t spoil them here in detail, but they feel more akin to the ones in cult mystery puzzle book Cain’s Jawbone than those I’ve seen in any other video game. Most often, Lorelei will present you with a puzzle and you either know what you need to do or you don’t. The puzzles are so compelling that you’ll often find yourself thinking about them even when you’re not playing, and though realizing the solution might take you hours, it feels so good when your subconscious finally hits on a likely solution as you’re just going about your day.

To ensure that you always have information on hand, the game’s protagonist has a photographic memory. Every image you look at or document you read is available to reference from the game’s menu. However, even with this information, every puzzle requires some real problem-solving on your part. No single puzzle is necessarily “easier” than another, they are just different, and your experience of them will vary based on your own skillset. Are you good at recognizing patterns? Do you have a solid inner compass? Have you memorized your Roman numerals? Some people will solve certain puzzles long before others, which leads to an interesting diversion in paths from player to player that only confirms how intricately crafted every part of the game is. The feeling of satisfaction I felt at solving a puzzle never went away, and it’s only encouraged by the game’s split-second pause between entering a solution and learning if you were correct or not.

Still, it’s not entirely without its pain points. While backtracking through the hotel between puzzles isn’t tedious, the constant backtracking between menus and puzzles is. You constantly need to reference in-game documents in your photographic memory, but there is no back button for menu navigation. It’s not game-ruining by any means, but after navigating through menus for sixteen hours, I really wished I could just press a button to exit my photographic memory instead of navigating to the exit button every time. That problem also extends to puzzles, which require you to enter a solution to exit the puzzle screen. That can grow annoying when you know you don’t have the answer yet but you just want to give the puzzle a look in order to do some brainstorming.

The aesthetic and mechanical layers of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes are just as impressive as the puzzles. The game is entirely rendered in greyscale, except for the occasional pop of red. But if the color palette seems reserved, it’s only because that isn’t the limit of the game’s art direction. It took me walking through a handful of different environments to realize that there’s a layered effect at play. Every 3D environment has a photo projection laid behind it. For example, the facade of the central hotel has a photo of a similar-looking building’s facade laid behind it. It gives an uncanny feel to every room you step into, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.

But Simogo didn’t stop at just two layers. The deeper I went into Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, the more layers there were. Again, describing exactly what those layers are risks spoiling the best moments of the game, but they are there and they are expertly woven in. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes continues to shift its form in new and unexpected ways. It takes the form of game design and uses it as a puzzle in itself.

Of course, the grandest puzzle of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is the story, a fact which highlights another masterful trick the game pulls off. As you solve puzzles, you’re also absorbing morsels of information that will finally lead you to answer those questions that hooked you in the first place. The puzzle solutions are the narrative at play. They feed the story, and the story feeds the puzzles in a perfect symbiotic relationship. And it’s a compelling narrative that will likely be a treat for fans of metanarrative games about art like last year’s Alan Wake 2 or 2022’s Immortality .

The game’s clashing and changing mechanical and visual styles are a reflection of the central conflict the characters within are struggling with. It’s a question of art. Each character within the game has their own concept of what the purpose of art is and who, if anybody, it is for. “A piece of art exists in itself and for itself,” one in-game document reads. “All art can and should not be for mankind.” But that’s just one of several conflicting ideas on display. Another character discusses art as a vital resource for life, something that must be consumed. Wrapped up in this are questions about artistic legacies, the preservation of digital art, and more. It’s enough to make your head spin, and it likely will for a good chunk of your playtime. But it’s always fascinating when you find a kernel of the story that digs into these themes more.

Once you reach the last moments, the game asks you one final question: have you been paying attention? It’s a stunning test not only of your own logic-solving skills but also of your deductive reasoning in regards to events within the game. Creating an ending for a mystery game is a puzzle in itself because so much of a player’s time is spent theorizing how the story will end, only for their theory to potentially be better than the final reveal. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is so confident that it does not feel the need to show the cards up its sleeve in service of wrapping things up neatly. Instead, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes gives you enough answers for that much-needed catharsis of a mystery solved, but still leaves some questions as to the exact details of events. By keeping some cards up its sleeve, as opposed to wrapping everything up neatly, the game perfectly pulls off its tricks.

I’ve made a lot of comparisons between Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and other pieces of media in this piece. That’s because the game is so hard to get a handle on. It’s so incredibly multifaceted and pulls on so many artistic mediums. It is one part memory play, one part puzzle game, one part mystery novel. It is the way all of these puzzle pieces fit together that shows Lorelei’s true art, and the act of being the one to connect them that makes it all so satisfying.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an amalgamation of influences living alongside one another in the same way the hotel in which it is set seems to hold so many times at once. It’s a reflection of the game’s biggest questions. What is the point of creating and consuming art? Is it a curse, or a gift? That’s the big mystery at the heart of Lorelia and the Laser Eyes . The answer is up to interpretation, but as it exists within such a carefully crafted maze of twisting puzzles and story beats, I can only assume this kind of gift for creating art is just that, a gift. And we, the players, are its lucky recipients. At least that’s my perception of it, and that’s about as close to the truth as I’ll get.

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Marking a Milestone: Four Years of Daily Study Groups

From data to discovery: studying computational biology with wolfram, navigating quantum computing: accelerating next-generation innovation, unlock innovative problem-solving skills with creative computation.

As computers continue to perform an increasing number of tasks for us, it’s never been more important to learn how to use computers in creative ways. Creative computing, an interdisciplinary subject combining coding with artistic expression, allows us to blend technology with human experiences. Learning to create in this way can help you unlock your innovative problem-solving skills. By mastering creative computation, you can create interactive artwork, design immersive experiences and develop creative solutions to real-world challenges.

Wolfram U ’s new Creative Computation course combines an introduction to Wolfram Language coding with a project-based exploration of various art forms, like visual art, poetry, audio and video game design. If you’ve never coded in Wolfram Language before, this course is a fantastic introduction to applied computing and will help you learn the language for any project. If you’ve already mastered the basics of coding, this course will help you apply your skills to fascinating new problems and projects.

We would love for you to join us in this interactive course as we explore what it means to work creatively with coding.

Motivation from History

Creative computing is a relatively new subject, but people have been using technology to make art for centuries. From the loom to the printing press or Walkman to Atari, technology has been part of art for as long as both have existed.

We now have a variety of exciting and creative ways to engage with computers, from AI-generated images to immersive virtual realities.

In this course, you will learn how to use Wolfram Language to create various forms of art. There are four main sections to the course: Computational Art, Computational Strings, Sound and Game Development. In each section, there are lessons teaching Wolfram Language skills, with associated exercises, and at the end of each section, there is a larger project. The projects are designed for you to stretch your creative muscles and use your new coding skills to create art. You’ll learn how to create visual art using images, how to write poetry using string manipulation, how to visualize audio and how to make text-based and graphics-based video games, all while learning how to code in Wolfram Language.

Here is a sneak peek at some of the topics in the course (shown in the left-hand column):

With 16 lessons, five quizzes and four projects, this course should take around five hours to complete. We recommend doing all the activities and projects to maximize your understanding and explore your new skills.

There is no background required to participate in this course. We will teach you all the coding skills you need to make the projects, so all that is required is your excitement and creativity.

Let’s explore what’s in the course.

There are 16 lessons in this course spread out over the five total sections (Computational Thinking and Coding, Computational Art, Computational Strings, Sound and Game Development). In each lesson, you will explore a different aspect of coding through a short video. You’ll start off by exploring the concept of computational thinking: how to translate your thoughts and your creativity into something the computer can understand and how to work with a computer to build creative artifacts. Here is a short excerpt from the video for this lesson:

Each lesson teaches a specific coding skill, with lots of examples and exploration of key concepts. In the Computational Art section, the goal is to use images and graphics to create a piece of art. In order to do that, we need to learn skills like variables, functions, lists, the Table and Map functions, colors, graphics and randomness, and image manipulation. Each skill is taught with an interactive video lesson in conjunction with exercises, before you use the project to test your knowledge.

The video lessons range from 5–13 minutes in length, and each video is accompanied by a transcript notebook displayed on the right-hand side of the screen. You can copy and paste Wolfram Language input directly from the transcript notebook to the embedded scratch notebook to try the examples for yourself.

Each lesson has a set of exercises to review the concepts covered during the lesson. Since this course is designed for independent study, a detailed solution is given for all exercises. Each exercise will help you practice a specific skill you’ve learned so that you are ready to use that skill in the project. Here is an example of an exercise from lesson 6 on image manipulation:

The exercise notebooks are interactive, so you can try variations of each problem in the Wolfram Cloud . You’re encouraged to blend skills together as you learn them. For example, for the aforementioned exercise, you could use the skills you just learned about randomness to replace the dominant colors in the image of the wolf with random colors, or you could import images to do the same exercise with a different image. When you’ve gotten further in the course, you could come back and build your own function that can do this to any two images.

Each section of the course includes a short project, and the Game Development section has two longer projects. In each case, you’ll use the skills you learned in that section to build something creative. In the first three sections, we provide detailed solutions and walk you though our processes, but in the Game Development section, we encourage you to build something unique.

In the Computational Art section, you’ll make art using images and shapes. In Computational Strings, you’ll write a Mad Libs haiku. In Sound, you’ll make an audio visualizer. In Game Development, you’ll make a text adventure game and a graphics-based Pac-Man –style game.

These projects will allow you to celebrate your successes and practice your new coding skills while cementing your understanding of creative computation.

Each section of the course ends with a short quiz, which allows you to demonstrate your understanding:

You will get instant feedback on your solutions, and you’re encouraged to try out the code.

Course Certificate

You are encouraged to watch all the lessons and attempt the projects and quizzes in the recommended sequence, since each topic in the course relies on earlier concepts and techniques. When you watch all 16 lesson videos and pass the five course quizzes, you will earn a certificate of course completion. The Track My Progress status bar in the course helps you to chart your progress, showing you where you left off from your previous course session. While you don’t have to submit projects to earn a certificate, they are a fundamental part of gaining computational skills, and we look forward to connecting with course users about their projects on Wolfram Community . Your course certificate represents completion of the basic course requirements, demonstrates your interest in exploring the latest technology and in building new computational skills, and it will add value to your resume or social media profile.

You are also encouraged to use the skills you learn in this course to go on to earn Level 1 certification for Wolfram Language proficiency . While the course does not require the same level of mathematics as the Level 1 certification exam, it will prepare you well for accomplishing the range of computational tasks that are required for Level 1 certification.

A Building Block for Success

A mastery of the fundamental concepts of creative computing will prepare you for working with computers to innovatively solve problems. Whether you’re interested in creating art or you’re interested in developing your coding skills, this course will provide a detailed foundation in both. Learning Wolfram Language is a valuable pursuit regardless of your career aspirations, as you can use the skills you learn in this course in any field.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my coauthor Eryn Gillam for their major contributions to the development of this course, as well as others who helped this course come together, including (but not limited to) Anisha Basil, Abrita Chakravarty, Cassidy Hinkle, Joyce Tracewell, Arben Kalziqi, Isabel Skidmore, Zach Shelton, Simeon Buttery, Ryan Domier and Eder Ordonez.

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Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to better understand teens’ use of and experiences with video games.

The Center conducted an online survey of 1,453 U.S. teens from Sept. 26 to Oct. 23, 2023, through Ipsos. Ipsos recruited the teens via their parents, who were part of its KnowledgePanel . The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey was weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories.

This research was reviewed and approved by an external institutional review board (IRB), Advarra, an independent committee of experts specializing in helping to protect the rights of research participants.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology .

There are long-standing debates about the impact of video games on youth. Some credit them for helping young people form friendships and teaching them about teamwork and problem-solving . Others say video games expose teenagers to violent content, negatively impact their sleep and can even lead to addiction.

With this in mind, Pew Research Center surveyed 1,423 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 about their own video game habits – from how often they play to the friends they’ve made and whether it gets in the way of them doing well in school or getting a good night’s sleep. 1

Key findings from the survey

• Video games as a part of daily teen life: 85% of U.S. teens report playing video games, and 41% say they play them at least once a day. Four-in-ten identify as a gamer.
• Gaming as a social experience: 72% of teens who play video games say that a reason why they play them is to spend time with others. And some have even made a friend online from playing them – 47% of teen video game players say they’ve done this.
• Helpful with problem-solving, less so for sleep: Over half of teens who play video games say it has helped their problem-solving skills, but 41% also say it has hurt their sleep.
• Bullying is a problem: 80% of all teens think harassment over video games is a problem for people their age. And 41% of those who play them say they’ve been called an offensive name when playing.
• Boys’ and girls’ experiences differ: Most teen boys and girls play video games, but larger shares of boys identify as gamers (62% vs. 17%) and play every day (61% vs. 22%). Boys who play them are also more likely to experience positive things from it, like making friends, and more troubling things like harassment.

Jump to read about: Who plays video games | Socializing over video games | Views about video games’ impact | Harassment and violence in video games      

Playing video games is widespread among teens. The vast majority of U.S. teens (85%) say they play them. Just 15% say they never do, according to the survey conducted Sept. 26-Oct. 23, 2023.

In addition to asking whether teens play video games, we also wanted to learn whether they consider themselves gamers. Overall, four-in-ten U.S. teens think of themselves as gamers. Just under half of teens (45%) play video games but do not think of themselves as gamers.

Nearly all boys (97%) say they play video games, compared with about three-quarters of teen girls. There is a substantial gap by gender in whether teens identify as gamers: 62% of teen boys do, compared with 17% of girls. 2

By gender and age

Younger teen girls are more likely than older girls to say they play video games: 81% of girls ages 13 to 14 compared with 67% of those ages 15 to 17. But among boys, nearly all play video games regardless of age. 

Similar shares of teens play video games across different racial and ethnic groups and among those who live in households with different annual incomes. Go to Appendix A for more detail on which teens play video games and which teens identify as gamers.

We also asked teens how often they play video games. About four-in-ten U.S. teens say they play video games daily, including 23% who do so several times a day.

Another 22% say they play several times a week, while 21% play them about once a week or less.

Teen boys are far more likely than girls to say they play video games daily (61% vs. 22%). They are also much more likely to say they play them several times a day (36% vs. 11%).

By whether someone identifies as a gamer

About seven-in-ten teens who identify as gamers (71%) say they play video games daily. This drops to 30% among those who play them but aren’t gamers.

By household income

Roughly half of teens living in households with an annual income of less than $30,000 (53%) say they play video games at least daily. This is higher than those in households with an annual income of $30,000 to $74,999 (42%) and $75,000 or more (39%).

Go to Appendix A to see more details about who plays video games and identifies as a gamer by gender, age, race and ethnicity, and household income.

Most teens play video games on a gaming console or a smartphone. When asked about five devices, most teens report playing video games on a gaming console (73%), such as PlayStation, Switch or Xbox. And 70% do so on a smartphone. Fewer – though still sizable shares – play them on each of the following:

• 49% say they play them on a desktop or laptop computer
• 33% do so on a tablet  
• 24% play them on a virtual reality (VR) headset such as Oculus, Meta Quest or PlayStation VR

Many teens play video games on multiple devices. About a quarter of teens (27%) do so on at least four of the five devices asked about, and about half (49%) play on two or three of them. Just 8% play video games on one device.

Teen boys are more likely than girls to play video games on four of the five devices asked about – all expect tablets. For instance, roughly nine-in-ten teen boys say they ever play video games on a gaming console, compared with 57% of girls. Equal shares of teen boys and girls play them on tablets.  

Teens who consider themselves gamers are more likely than those who play video games but aren’t gamers to play on a gaming console (95% vs. 78%), desktop or laptop computer (72% vs. 45%) or a virtual reality (VR) headset (39% vs. 19%). Similar shares of both groups play them on smartphones and tablets.

One way that teens engage with others about video games is through online platforms. And our survey findings show that teen gamers stand out for their use of two online platforms that are known for their gaming communities – Discord and Twitch :

• 44% of teen gamers say they use Discord, far higher than video game players who don’t identify as gamers or those who use the platform but do not play video games at all. About three-in-ten teens overall (28%) use Discord.
• 30% of teens gamers say they use Twitch. About one-in-ten other teens or fewer say the same; 17% of teens overall use the platform.

Previous Center research shows that U.S. teens use online platforms at high rates .

Teens largely say they spend the right amount of time playing video games. When asked about how much time they spend playing them, the largest share of teens (58%) say they spend the right amount of time. Far fewer feel they spend too much (14%) or too little (13%) time playing them.

Teen boys are more likely than girls to say they spend too much time playing video games (22% vs. 6%).

By race and ethnicity

Black (17%) and Hispanic (18%) teens are about twice as likely than White teens (8%) to say they spend too little time playing video games. 3

A quarter of teens who consider themselves gamers say they spend too much time playing video games, compared with 9% of those who play video games but don’t identify as gamers. Teen gamers are also less likely to think they spend too little time playing them (19% vs. 10%).

Fewer than half of teens have reduced how much they play video games. About four-in-ten (38%) say they have ever chosen to cut back on the amount of time they spend playing them. A majority (61%) report that they have not cut back at all.

This share is on par with findings about whether teenagers have cut back with their screen time – on social media or their smartphone.

Although boys are more likely to say they play video games too much, boys and girls are on par for whether they have ever cut back. About four-in-ten teen boys (39%) and girls (38%) say that they have ever cut back.

And gamers are as likely to say they have cut back as those who play video games but don’t identify as gamers (39% and 41%).

A main goal of our survey was to ask teens about their own experiences playing video games. For this section of the report, we focus on teens who say they play video games.

Socializing with others is a key part of the video game experience. Most teens who play video games do so with others, and some have developed friendships through them.

About nine-in-ten teen video game players (89%) say they play them with other people, in person or online. Far fewer (11%) play them only on their own.

Additionally, about half (47%) report that they have ever made a friend online because of a video game they both play. This equals 40% of all U.S. teens who have made a friend online because of a video game.

These experiences vary by:  

• Gender: Most teen boy and girl video game players play them with others, though it’s more common among boys (94% vs. 82%). Boys who play video games are much more likely to say they have made a friend online because of a video game (56% vs. 35%).
• Race and ethnicity: Black (55%) and Hispanic (53%) teen video game players are more likely than White teen video game players (43%) to say they have made a friend online because of them.
• Whether someone identifies as a gamer: Nearly all teen gamers report playing video games with others (98%). Fewer – though still most – of those who play video games but aren’t gamers (81%) also play them with others. And about seven-in-ten (68%) say they have made a friend online because of a video game, compared with 29% of those who play them but don’t identify as gamers.

Teens who play video games are particularly likely to say video games help their problem-solving skills. More than half of teens who play video games (56%) say this.

Additionally, more think that video games help, rather than hurt, three other parts of their lives that the survey asked about. Among teens who play video games:

• Roughly half (47%) say it has helped their friendships
• 41% say it has helped how they work with others
• 32% say it has helped their mental health

No more than 7% say playing video games has hurt any of these.

More teens who play video games say it hurts, rather than helps, their sleep. Among these teens, 41% say it has hurt how much sleep they get, while just 5% say it helps. And small shares say playing video games has impacted how well they do in school in either a positive or a negative way.

Still, many teens who play video games think playing them doesn’t have much an impact in any of these areas. For instance, at least six-in-ten teens who play video games say it has neither a positive nor a negative impact on their mental health (60%) or their school performance (72%). Fewer (41%) say this of their problem-solving skills.

Teen boys who play video games are more likely than girls to think playing them has helped their problem-solving skills, friendships and ability to work with others. For instance, 55% of teen boys who play video games say this has helped their friendships, compared with 35% of teen girls.

As for ways that it may hurt their lives, boys who play them are more likely than girls to say that it has hurt the amount of sleep they get (45% vs. 37%) and how well they do in school (21% vs. 11%). 

Teens who consider themselves gamers are more likely than those who aren’t gamers but play video games to say video games have helped their friendships (60% vs. 35%), ability to work with others (52% vs. 32%), problem-solving skills (66% vs. 47%) and mental health (41% vs. 24%).

Gamers, though, are somewhat more likely to say playing them hurt their sleep (48% vs. 36%) and how well they do in school (20% vs. 14%).

By whether teens play too much, too little or the right amount

Teens who report playing video games too much stand out for thinking video games have hurt their sleep and school performance. Two-thirds of these teens say it has hurt the amount of sleep they get, and 39% say it hurt their schoolwork. Far fewer of those who say they play the right amount (38%) or too little (32%) say it has hurt their sleep, or say it hurt their schoolwork (12% and 16%).

Teens who play video games say they largely do so to be entertained. And many also play them to be social with and interact with others. Teens who play video games were asked about four reasons why they play video games. Among those who play video games:

• Nearly all say fun or entertainment is a major or minor reason why they play video games – with a large majority (87%) saying it’s a major reason.
• Roughly three-quarters say spending time with others is a reason, and two-thirds say this of competing with others. Roughly three-in-ten say each is a major reason.
• Fewer – 50% – see learning something as a reason, with just 13% saying it’s a major reason.

While entertainment is by far the most common reason given by teens who play video games, differences emerge across groups in why they play video games.

Teens who identify as gamers are particularly likely to say each is major reason, especially when it comes to competing against others. About four-in-ten gamers (43%) say this is a major reason, compared with 13% of those who play video games but aren’t gamers.

Teen boys who play video games are more likely than girls to say competing (36% vs. 15%), spending time with others (36% vs. 27%) and entertainment (90% vs. 83%) are major reasons they play video games.

Black and Hispanic teens who play video games are more likely than White teens to say that learning new things and competing against others are major reasons they play them. For instance, 29% of Black teen video game players say learning something new is a major reason, higher than 17% of Hispanic teen video game players. Both are higher than the 7% of White teen video game players who say the same.

Teens who play video games and live in lower-income households are especially likely to say competing against others and learning new things are major reasons. For instance, four-in-ten teen video game players who live in households with an annual income of less than $30,000 say competing against others is a major reason they play. This is higher than among those in households with annual incomes of $30,000 to $74,999 (29%) and $75,000 or more (23%).

Cyberbullying can happen in many online environments, but many teens encounter this in the video game world.

Our survey finds that name-calling is a relatively common feature of video game life – especially for boys. Roughly four-in-ten teen video game players (43%) say they have been harassed or bullied while playing a video game in one of three ways: 

• 41% have been called an offensive name
• 12% have been physically threatened
• 8% have been sent unwanted sexually explicit things

Teen boys are particularly likely to say they have been called an offensive name. About half of teen boys who play video games (48%) say this has happened while playing them, compared with about a third of girls (32%). And they are somewhat more likely than girls to have been physically threatened (15% vs. 9%).

Teen gamers are more likely than those who play video games but aren’t gamers to say they been called and offensive name (53% vs. 30%), been physically threatened (17% vs. 8%) and sent unwanted sexually explicit things (10% vs. 6%).

Teens – regardless of whether they’ve had these experiences – think bullying is a problem in gaming. Eight-in-ten U.S. teens say that when it comes to video games, harassment and bullying is a problem for people their age. This includes 29% who say it is a major problem.

It’s common for teens to think harassment while playing video games is a problem, but girls are somewhat more likely than boys to say it’s a major problem (33% vs. 25%).

There have also been decades-long debates about how violent video games can influence youth behavior , if at all – such as by encouraging or desensitizing them to violence. We wanted to get a sense of how commonly violence shows up in the video games teens are playing.

Just over half of teens who play video games (56%) say at least some of the games they play contain violence. This includes 16% who say it’s in all or most of the games they play.

Teen boys who play video games are far more likely than girls to say that at least some of the games they play contain violence (69% vs. 37%).

About three-quarters of teen gamers (73%) say that at least some of the games they play contain violence, compared with 40% among video game players who aren’t gamers.   

• Throughout this report, “teens” refers to those ages 13 to 17. ↩
• Previous Center research of U.S. adults shows that men are more likely than women to identify as gamers – especially the youngest adults. ↩
• There were not enough Asian American respondents in the sample to be broken out into a separate analysis. As always, their responses are incorporated into the general population figures throughout the report. ↩

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