Thrice

In terms of play mechanics, Thrice is as to-the-point as it gets: in each of the game’s five daily rounds, you’re faced with a question from the realm of science, entertainment, art, or society. If you guess wrong, you get two more attempts, although with a more easily worded question and a lesser score. It’s the perfect way to spend 5 minutes of your day – and not a second more!

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CineNerdle Battle Royale

We’ve featured CineNerdle in a previous article of this series, but it bears repeating – in addition to a new website, every cinephile’s go-to time-waster now has a Battle Royale mode! Every 30 minutes, you and 20 other movie aficionados are grouped into a lobby and tasked with chaining together films based on their cast and creators. There are also penalties to avoid and bonuses to collect, which makes for unexpectedly tense games where the true winner isn’t always clear until the very end.

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Metaflora

Next on the list is Metaflora, a follow-up to Metazooa, which we’ve brought up in the previous article. The principle remains the same: your task is to identify a particular living organism (this time, a plant rather than animal) based on its placement within the biological kingdoms, classes, and orders. It’s a good way to test how truly well you know your plant life and learn some cool facts in the process.

Words and erudition

Bracket City

The first of three games by The Atlantic on our list, Bracket City is a fun way to dip into random history while wracking your brain. In it, a single sentence has been turned into a “nesting doll” of bracketed definitions. Solve one, and you get to decipher the next one – and so on and so on, until you get to learn about an event that happened on this day in history.

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Stacks

It’s like Tetris, but with words – in Stacks, it’s all about making order out of chaos. At the start, you’ve got a pyramid to fill with letters and a few words to quite literally “drop” onto the field in order to make new words. It sounds rather simple, but is actually quite a challenge!

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Fluxis

Our third pick from the magazine’s games arsenal is Fluxis, a game with a delightfully smart concept. Here, you’re asked to create a “loop” using words with the same ending and starting sets of letters; but on top of this overlap requirement, they’ve also got to fit neatly into all kinds of categories – from word types to repeating characters and so on. This one’ll keep you busy for a while, but the joy of all clues finally clicking into place is worth it.