Board Games That Help Improve Your IQ Score
Chess
How it helps: Chess is a classic strategy game that helps develop problem-solving skills, pattern recognition, concentration, and strategic thinking.
Summary of rules: Chess is played on an 8x8 board with each player having 16 pieces: 1 king, 1 queen, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, and 8 pawns. The objective is to checkmate the opponent's king, which means putting it under attack with no legal moves left. Each piece has a unique way of moving, and players take turns moving one piece at a time.
Go (also known as Weiqi or Baduk)
How it helps: Go helps build intelligence by developing strategic thinking, pattern recognition, and decision-making skills.
Summary of rules: Go is played on a grid (usually 19x19) with black and white stones. Players take turns placing a stone on an intersection point, aiming to surround the opponent's stones and capture territory. Once placed, stones don't move unless they're captured. The game ends when both players pass, and the winner is determined by the total territory and captured stones.
Pandemic
How it helps: Pandemic enhances intelligence by fostering collaboration, strategic thinking, and risk assessment skills.
Summary of rules: Pandemic is a cooperative board game where players work together to prevent the spread of diseases across the globe. Each player takes on a specific role with unique abilities, and on their turn, they can perform actions such as traveling, treating diseases, or building research stations. Players win by discovering the cures for all four diseases. However, they lose if outbreaks occur too often, they run out of time, or there aren't enough disease cubes.
Settlers of Catan
How it helps: This game promotes intelligence by encouraging strategic thinking, negotiation skills, and resource management.
Summary of rules: In Settlers of Catan, players aim to build settlements, cities, and roads on a variable, hexagonal game board. Each hexagon produces resources that players collect when its number is rolled on the dice. Players use these resources to build structures, upgrade settlements, or purchase development cards. They can also trade resources with other players. The goal is to reach a certain number of victory points, primarily earned by building structures.
Codenames
How it helps: Codenames helps build intelligence by promoting critical thinking, language skills, and teamwork.
Summary of rules: In Codenames, players split into two teams, each with a spymaster and field operatives. The spymasters know the secret identities of 25 agents represented by words on a grid. They give one-word clues, along with a number indicating how many words on the board are related to that clue. The field operatives try to guess the agents' codenames by linking the clue to the words on the grid. The first team to correctly identify all their agents wins, but selecting the "assassin" word results in an instant loss.