Does Triad Actually Make You Smarter?

No game reliably raises your general intelligence, and Triad is no exception. That is the short answer. The longer answer is more useful: research does say something about what a hard strategy game exercises, and it is worth knowing what that is and where the evidence stops.

Triad is a free online version of Sim, the 1969 pencil-and-paper game by Gustavus Simmons where two players draw lines between six dots and the first to complete a triangle in their own colour loses. If you are new to it, start with what is Sim.

What the Evidence Rules Out

Playing a graph-colouring game will not raise your general intelligence, slow cognitive ageing, or make you better at unrelated tasks at work. The research on this is fairly clear.

In 2014, around 70 cognitive scientists and neuroscientists signed a consensus statement, organised through the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. It said there was no compelling evidence that brain games improve everyday cognition or prevent decline. A large review published two years later by Simons and colleagues reached a similar conclusion: practising cognitive drills improves performance on those drills, but there is little evidence of broad gains in daily life. A second-order meta-analysis (a meta-analysis of meta-analyses) by Sala and Gobet found that the benefits of cognitive training barely extend past the trained task and tasks very like it.

Researchers call this the "far transfer" problem. Getting good at a game mostly makes you good at that game. That is the limit, but it is not the whole story.

What the Evidence Supports

Near transfer is real. People reliably improve at the specific mental operations a task requires. So the useful question is not whether a game makes you smarter, but which operations it uses and whether those are worth practising.

What a game asks you to do matters more than its genre. A 2023 meta-analysis by Smith and Basak pooled 63 video-game training studies and found a modest overall effect on cognition (Hedges's g ≈ 0.25). Genre labels such as "strategy" or "action" did not predict the gains. The specific demands of the gameplay did.

A demanding strategy game can improve the skill it demands. In a randomised controlled trial, Glass, Maddox and Love (2013) trained participants on two versions of a real-time strategy game. The version that made players keep track of, and switch between, several sources of information produced a large gain in cognitive flexibility, measured on separate, unrelated tasks. The cause was what the game required, not the type of game.

Chess shows some benefit, with caveats. A 2016 meta-analysis by Sala and Gobet of school chess programmes found small to moderate gains in children's maths and general cognitive ability, larger with more hours of instruction. Almost none of the studies compared chess with another engaging activity, though, so part of the effect may come from simply doing something new. Treat it as suggestive, not settled.

What Triad Actually Trains

Set against those findings, a single game of Triad asks you to do all of this:

• Watch for a pattern you must not complete. Most games reward finishing a pattern. Sim punishes it. You keep scanning the board for a triangle you must avoid closing, which is a different kind of attention from chasing a goal.
• Look ahead. Every edge you want has to be checked against the triangles it could complete, several moves deep, in a small but tight space. That is planning.
• Hold back. The tempting move and the safe move are often the same edge, apart from one fatal triangle. Learning not to take the obvious play is practice in self-control.
• Switch between views. Each move changes both your position and your opponent's, so you have to re-evaluate after every turn. That is the same switching demand that produced the effect in the trial above.
• Predict your opponent. You are not solving a fixed puzzle. You are working out what another player will do, which uses working memory and a model of their thinking at the same time.

Together that is steady practice in planning, self-control and flexible thinking, and a heavier mental load than most things you might open on your phone.

The Long Game

There is one more line of evidence: cognitive reserve, the idea that an active mind copes better with ageing.

A systematic review and meta-analysis by Yates and colleagues (2016) found that taking part in mentally stimulating leisure activities was associated with a lower risk of later cognitive impairment and dementia (a pooled hazard ratio for dementia of about 0.6). An Australian study by Wu and colleagues (2023) followed more than 10,000 adults aged 70 and over for up to a decade. Those who more often did active mental activities, such as playing games, cards or chess and doing crosswords or puzzles, had a lower risk of dementia. Social outings showed no such link.

Two caveats. These are observational studies, so they do not prove cause and effect: people who stay mentally active may differ in other ways. And the effects build over years, not weeks. Still, the activities linked with lower risk are the effortful, game-like ones, and a few minutes a day of hard strategic thinking fits that pattern.

How to Get the Most From It

The researchers who doubt brain training broadly agree on one thing: whatever benefit there is comes from sustained effort on a genuinely hard problem. There is no special ingredient. That suggests a few ways to play:

• Play with attention, not on autopilot. A few games where you actually look ahead and think about your opponent are worth more than many games played without thinking. The benefit comes from the effort.
• Use it to focus. A short game that needs your full attention is a good way to settle into concentrated work, and the opposite of scrolling.
• Play Perfect from the second seat. Sim is a second-player win, so if you go first against the Perfect AI you can never win. Take the second seat instead, which Triad gives you by default when you pick Perfect. From there a win is always possible in principle, but one slip is enough for the AI to take over, so every game tests whether you can play without a single mistake.

No game will make you generally smarter, and nothing you do for a few minutes on a screen will either. What Triad offers is concrete: regular practice in planning, self-control and flexible thinking, the kind of effortful activity the long-term evidence favours, and a few minutes of real focus. If that sounds worthwhile, play a game.

References

• Stanford Center on Longevity & Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2014). A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community.
• Simons, D. J., et al. (2016). Do "Brain-Training" Programs Work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103-186.
• Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis. Collabra: Psychology, 5(1).
• Smith, E. T., & Basak, C. (2023). A game-factors approach to cognitive benefits from video-game training: A meta-analysis. PLoS ONE, 18(8): e0285925.
• Glass, B. D., Maddox, W. T., & Love, B. C. (2013). Real-Time Strategy Game Training: Emergence of a Cognitive Flexibility Trait. PLoS ONE, 8(8): e70350.
• Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2016). Do the benefits of chess instruction transfer to academic and cognitive skills? A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 18, 46-57.
• Yates, L. A., Ziser, S., Spector, A., & Orrell, M. (2016). Cognitive leisure activities and future risk of cognitive impairment and dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis. International Psychogeriatrics, 28(11), 1791-1806.
• Wu, Z., et al. (2023). Lifestyle Enrichment in Later Life and Its Association With Dementia Risk. JAMA Network Open, 6(7): e2323690.

This article summarises published research for general interest. It is not medical advice. References are provided so you can check the claims yourself.