Forgetfulness is something that easily comes with age or with the lack of stimulation to your brain. Most of the time, it’s easy to remember what you initially forgot, but there are also times when you just can’t seem to put a finger on it. It is because of this that we present to you a curated list of some of the best free brain games for mobile to help you improve your memory and other important cognitive skills.
Whether you have an Android or iOS smartphone, we got you covered! In this article, we’ll be exploring different free brain games and how they will benefit the player.
Related: Smartly Casual: 15 Best Casual Games for Mobile in 2022
Inside This Article
16 Best Free Brain Games for Sharper Memory
These best free brain games are great ways to improve your cognitive skills and enhance your memory. Most games are great for all ages, while some of them also make great memory games for seniors. Some brain games also adjust the overall difficulty of the games to meet your current state of mind. Take note that results will not immediately manifest, and you’ll have to continuously use the apps to be able to see the results.
Without further ado, here are 15 of the best free brain games to help you enhance your memory.
1. Lumosity
Lumosity is one of the more popular free brain games on the market. It’s an app that contains various mini-games that help improve your thinking, focus, problem-solving skills, and memory. Each brain-training session in Lumosity will present you with three games that get challenging as you progress. Additionally, you’ll also be playing them in a race against time.
2. NeuroNation
NeuroNation allows you to train your brain and gives new momentum that will help you start anew. The app helps curate a brain training plan that will meet your specific needs. Whether you want to sharpen your memory or enhance your focus, NeuroNation has over 30 exercises that will effectively train your brain and sharpen your mind.
Download NeuroNation for Android
3. Elevate
Up next on this list of best free brain games is Elevate. It’s another popular name in the market and for good reason as well. Not only does it help you with personalized routines and daily games, but it also gives you a workout calendar for tracking your progress. Elevate has over 30 games that you can play through and make progress with. Furthermore, Elevate also adapts its difficulty as you show progress. The app keeps its games interesting that way.
4. Brain Test: Tricky Puzzles
Brain Test features puzzle games that will help to sharpen your cognitive skills. This game is perfect if you’re looking for something different at every level. You’ll be able to crack puzzles, solve riddles, and think out of the box with various fun yet challenging games. It’s a great addition to this list of free brain games as it’s able to effectively help you train your brain in new ways.
Download Brain Test for Android
5. CogniFit Brain Fitness
CogniFit makes brain training more fun and addictive by providing different games and tests. Not only will you be able to enhance your cognitive skills using it, but you can also track your progress and access insights about your overall brain health. CogniFit makes things more interesting by allowing you to challenge your friends to puzzles and games. The app also makes the games more tailored to your needs by giving you an initial quiz that will assess your current condition. From there, the difficulty of the games will adjust according to your profile.
6. Peak
Look no further than Peak if you want one of the best free brain games that are sleek, fun, and critical. It is designed to provide brain training workouts that are well suited for various players. With Peak, you will be able to access brain games and puzzles that will challenge and enhance your focus, memory, problem-solving skills, language, and even mental agility. The app also provides a tracker that will help you keep an eye on your progress. It’s a great app for all ages that will keep you wanting to play more.
Download Peak Brain Games for Android
Download Peak Brain Games for iOS
7. Brainwell
Brainwell is a brain training app that provides fun and attractive free brain games, progress reports, and training regimens to keep brains active. It also takes things to another level by allowing you to challenge your friends and compare results. It’s a great app to have because it encourages socialization while still training other cognitive skills like memory, language, and problem-solving. By letting you play with other players, Brainwell keeps you more entertained and inclined to train.
Download Brainwell for Android
8. Happify
Keeping a peaceful head is an important step to being able to sharpen your memory. Happify helps you reduce stress and build resilience with tools that aim to improve an individual’s emotional well-being. The app also makes it easy to cope with stress, conquer negative thoughts, and show gratitude. By removing negativity and toxicity from your life, you’ll be able to develop your cognitive skills easier and faster.
9. Brain Wars
If you’re a fan of trivia apps and games, Brain Wars might interest you. In this game, you will be challenged to solve puzzles, brainteasers, and other brain training games while challenging your friends or other players. The game is a great way to develop your cognitive skills at once while still being able to socialize with other players. Just take note that the game might be difficult for the younger audiences and they might not be able to fully appreciate the game.
Download Brain Wars for Android
10. Brain Out
Want more best free brain games for boosting cognitive skills and having an enjoyable bonding time with your kids or younger siblings? Consider Brain Out. Its graphics are 2D cartoon-like, making the game attractive even to children. Also, it’s easy to play through only a few taps.
As for its brain teasers, they are addictive and funny because you have to think of not-so-ordinary ways to solve the problems. By that, we mean finding your way through a maze without entering the maze, for example. Although Brain Out isn’t a straight-up memory game, it is one way to get your mind used to come up with unconventional ideas similar to what was needed in the game.
Download Brain Out for Android
11. Super Brain Plus
For some people, good memory and cognitive skills are retained by simply keeping the brain active. If you think that is also what you need, Super Brain Plus is worth trying. The game isn’t your boring compilation of random free brain games. It has the popular classic puzzles you might have enjoyed when you were still young. For example, Lines, Unblock, 2048, Sudoku, and more.
Download Brain Plus for Android
12. MindPal
MindPal offers more than 30 games from the word, math, memory, and puzzle genres. Such games support thousands of levels for endless fun. But playing several games can be difficult to do or remember every day, right? That is where the app’s various progress tracking features come in. On MindPal, you’ll see a weekly calendar showing how close or far you are from completing each day’s challenges. It’s like one of those productivity apps that can remind you about things but aren’t stressful. Furthermore, you can check your improvements in speed, attention, memory, and problem-solving through easy-to-understand graphs.
13. Brain It On!
Brain It On! is among the free brain games that revolve around physics. That doesn’t mean its numerous puzzles are impossible to solve without knowledge of the said branch of science. As long as you can draw lines, think flexibly, and remember how you’ve gone past the previous levels (for similar tricks might still be useful across challenges), you can make progress. Come up with different ways to move objects to where they need to be in-game — you can experiment with shapes that can be used as ramps, walls, and more. The effort is all worth it not only because of the fun you get. You can stimulate your brain, which helps with its overall improvement.
Download Brain It Out for Android
14. Concentration: Match Game
Don’t like free brain games that focus on language and math? You might prefer one that is picture-based, such as Concentrate. The game is a photo-matching game that sharpens your memory. Although the format is typical for a memory game, you would not get bored while playing Concentrate. That is because the game supports various themes, including animals, food, automobiles, musical instruments, and brands.
Download Concentration Match Game for Android
15. Personal Zen
The rising cases of people living with anxiety inspired the makers of this game to develop an app that seeks to help people deal with anxiety. At the heart of Personal Zen is the aim to help people focus more on the positives and less on the negatives. Players are expected to develop personal resiliency by playing an hour or more per day by following two types of characters throughout the gameplay: one looks calm and friendly while the other looks angrier.
Download Personal Zen for Android
16. aa
aa is a game that makes a lot of players annoyed when they get it wrong. The game’s interface and gameplay are simple yet it requires the biggest amount of attention and focus you can give in order to get it right. Essentially, you need to pin the numbers on the rotating knob in the center of the screen. It’s like playing darts and the goal is to avoid hitting the same spot twice. This game will surely develop your focus and critical thinking on top of challenging your brain to concentrate on where to pin the numbers.
Benefits of Playing Mobile Brain Games
Despite what most people think, mobile games, especially free brain games, have benefits attached to them as well. They aren’t as bad as many people may think. Not only can some games help with brain training but they also help with socialization and even motor skills.
With that, here are five benefits that you can get while playing mobile brain games.
1. Enhances Motor Skills
Playing mobile games can help enhance your ability to perform certain actions. Some mobile games can help train you to use certain muscles for certain actions. They also improve manual dexterity and allow you to have better motor skills and shorter reaction times than most people who don’t play regularly or those who don’t play games at all.
2. Encourages Better Wellbeing
Mobile games, especially free brain games, require full attention and concentration. Most games will also need full engagement, which improves focus. They also help you to think faster and to exercise flexible thinking. It trains the brain and may affect positively an individual’s overall well-being.
3. Teaches Better Social Skills
Some brain games allow you to interact and befriend other gamers who play the same game. Through those, you can talk to your friends, make new ones, and even challenge each other to some fun rounds. This creates and encourages social interaction as you progress. Training social skills through mobile games is a great way to start, especially if you’re wary of social interaction in a public setting.
4. Learn More, Play More
With some mobile games, especially free brain games, you’ll be able to learn something new every day. Playing mobile games can improve your learning ability and comprehension. Thus, many brain games have managed to incorporate several subjects in a game so that you’ll be able to learn more without necessarily having to learn from a teacher.
5. Improves Cognitive Skills
Playing free brain games, or anything mobile game for that matter, allows you to train your brain in more ways than one. By playing a game, your cognitive skills are given a boost. Your brain gets the opportunity to gain some learning or develop a certain skill as you advance through the game. You’ll be able to easily spot errors in the game and think your way through difficult puzzles. In all, playing mobile games is a great way to develop cognitive skills because of the games’ varying elements and engaging mechanics.
Will Free Brain Games Keep Your Memory Sharp?
Many games claim to be able to keep one’s memory sharp, but that isn’t always the case.
According to an article by Harvard Health, playing brain games of any type — be it mobile games, crossword puzzles, or board games — are not exactly the best activity if you want to improve memory, but they may help with other brain skills.
The article further states that, while playing brain games can help with building the brain’s cognitive reserve, it also needs regular exercise and a physically active body. Playing free brain games on your phones and tablets might be able to help with cognition, but it cannot do the work on its own. You will have to combine physical exercise with brain games to build a better cognitive reserve.
Similarly, the American Psychological Association also mentioned that playing brain games to induce cognitive boosts has not been put to study. Most brain-training products, including games, have yet to be tested in controlled conditions. So, there is no way to check if the effects of brain training via free brain games are effective.
The article also mentions that physical activity is just as important as training the brain. It further mentions that you cannot expect fast results just by playing games — you will need to undergo the process many times as well for it to show results.
Given that, it’s safe to say that a healthy body is also the key to great cognitive skills and a healthy brain. You might not want to skip out on your workouts from now on but if you’re looking for an app to keep you motivated, we have a list of fitness apps that will help you with just that!
Wrap-Up
These best free brain games are great to keep your mind occupied while improving your memory and cognitive skills. However, don’t forget that physical exercise is just as important as doing mental exercises. You cannot expect to have better memory by just installing the app. Rather, you need to be prepared to repeatedly play the games to see results. Brain training, for any purpose, isn’t an overnight process. You have to be committed to your brain training regimen to produce the results that you want. Free brain games are great for people who don’t want to get too technical but still want to try brain training to improve memory and cognitive skills. There is a game for everyone and it’s just a matter of finding the ideal brain game for you so that you don’t lose motivation.
