Prevention has games for your brain

Prevention has games for your brain - Time Waster

by Christina Clark Sep 25th 2008

I'm sure Prevention magazine is not the first place you would look for time-wasters but, they have a pretty good variety of them. You can choose to play "fun games" or "brain games."

The fun games offer sudoku, word search, mah jongg, and a fun little thing called Spliterature. In Spliterature you are given a jumbled batch of letters and you have to create two words that fit into a certain category. And you have to do it as fast as you can. The word search is extrememly easy until you get to the bonus round. Then you have a category but no word list and must search for words you think might fit the category.

The brain games page has just as many fun choices which supposedly sharpen your memory and you mind. It's not going to help any of us do Jedi mind tricks any time soon but, the games are fun. You can choose from Street of Dreams where you have to match words into categories - simple until some of the categories are hidden from you.

Pandara's Boutique offers a variety of items and prompts for you to spot the identical items or pick out the one that is different. All as quickly as you can. Heraldry is a memory game where you look at a coat of arms and then recreate it from memory. Other options are Busy Bistro, another memory game and Secret Files where you have to catch falling words in specific folders to organize them.

None of these are games that I would play for hours and hours but I do enjoy a good word game now and then and Prevention offers that and a bit more to keep you busy. The games are good for a quick break and if they exercise your brain in the process, well, that's even better.

Tags: brain fitness, BrainFitness, prevention, preventionmagazine, time-waster

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I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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