Does Triad Actually Make You Smarter?

Honestly? Not the way the brain-training ads mean it: no game reliably raises your general intelligence. But that is the boring half of the answer. What a genuinely hard strategy game does to your thinking has a real, more interesting answer in the cognitive-science literature. Here it is, with the hype stripped out.

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.

First, What the Evidence Rules Out

Playing a graph-colouring game will not raise your general intelligence, reverse cognitive ageing, or make you better at unrelated tasks at work. The evidence on that is clear, and it is worth knowing why.

In 2014, more than 70 cognitive scientists and neuroscientists signed a consensus statement, organised through the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute, objecting that there was no compelling evidence brain games meaningfully improve everyday cognition or hold off decline. A major review from the same period reached a similar verdict: practising decontextualised cognitive drills does not produce broad, real-world gains. A second-order meta-analysis (a meta-analysis of meta-analyses) by Sala and Gobet found that the benefits of cognitive-training programmes barely extend past the trained task and tasks closely resembling it. And a cross-sectional study of over 60,000 people found that self-reported brain-trainers had no measurable advantage on working memory, reasoning, or verbal ability.

This is the “far transfer” problem: getting good at a game mostly makes you good at the game. That is the ceiling. The interesting part is everything underneath it, which turns out to be a good deal more than nothing.

What Does Hold Up

Here is the more interesting half of the literature.

Near transfer is real. You reliably improve at the specific cognitive operations a task demands. So the question worth asking is not whether a game makes you smarter; it is which mental operations it actually loads, and whether those are worth training.

The structure of the game matters more than the label. A 2023 meta-analysis of 63 video-game training studies found a modest but real overall effect on cognition (Hedges’s g ≈ 0.25), with one important nuance: genre labels like “strategy” or “action” did not predict the gains; specific gameplay demands did. What you are forced to do beat what the game is called.

Demanding strategy games can transfer to the demand they impose. In a randomised controlled trial, Glass, Maddox and Love (2013) had participants train on two versions of a real-time strategy game. The version that forced players to hold and rapidly switch between multiple sources of information produced a large gain in cognitive flexibility, measured on a battery of unrelated tasks. The mechanism was the demand structure, not the genre.

The abstract-strategy family looks reasonable. Reviews of chess, Go and related games associate sustained play with better attention, working memory and planning: the cluster psychologists call executive function. Much of this evidence is correlational or modest in size, so treat it as suggestive rather than settled. But the direction is consistent, and it points at exactly the operations a turn-based combinatorial game exercises.

What Triad Actually Trains

Mapped onto the operations the literature cares about, a single game of Triad makes you do all of this:

• Pattern-avoidance vigilance. Most games reward completing a pattern. Sim punishes it. You are continuously scanning the board for an emerging configuration you must not finish: sustained, inhibitory attention rather than reward-seeking.
• Forward look-ahead under constraints. Every edge you would like to take has to be checked against the triangles it would complete, several moves deep, in a tight combinatorial space. That is planning in its purest form.
• Inhibitory control. The tempting move and the safe move are often the same edge, minus one fatal triangle. Learning to not take the obvious play is a direct rep for response inhibition.
• Cognitive flexibility. Each move simultaneously changes your threats and your opponent’s. You are constantly re-evaluating, the same switching demand that drove the transfer effect in the trial above.
• Adversarial modelling. You are not solving a static puzzle; you are reasoning about what a thinking opponent will do. It is working memory plus theory of mind, held together under a little pressure.

All of this is a concentrated, repeatable rep on planning, inhibition and flexibility: a meaningfully heavier cognitive load than almost anything else you would open on your phone.

The Long Game

There is one more line of evidence worth weighing: cognitive reserve.

A systematic review and meta-analysis found that participation in mentally stimulating leisure activities was associated with lower risk of later-life cognitive impairment and dementia (pooled hazard ratios around 0.6). A large Australian cohort followed roughly 10,000 older adults for a decade and found that active mental activities (specifically playing games, cards or chess and doing puzzles) were associated with reduced dementia risk, while passive social outings were not.

Two caveats, stated plainly. This is observational data, so causation is not proven: people who stay mentally engaged differ in other ways too. And the effect plays out over decades, not weeks. Neither changes the takeaway: the activities carrying the association are the deliberate, effortful, game-like ones, and a short daily bout of hard strategic thinking is a cheap bet that sits squarely inside that pattern.

The Actual Mechanism (and How to Use It)

Strip away the hype and here is what is left, which even the sceptics broadly agree on: the value comes from sustained, effortful engagement with a genuinely difficult problem. Not from a magic ingredient, but from focus itself.

That reframes how to get something out of Triad:

• Treat it as a focused rep, not a nootropic. A few deliberate games where you actually look ahead and read your opponent will do more for you than a hundred games on autopilot. The benefit is in the effort, so spend it.
• Use it as a focus primer. A short, fully absorbing strategic task is a clean way to drop into a concentrated state, the opposite of fragmented scrolling. Several minutes of single-tasking is the point.
• Play the hard difficulty on purpose. Sim is mathematically a second-player win, which means that against a perfect opponent the first player cannot win with flawless play. That sounds discouraging; it is actually the feature. Playing a solver as first player turns the game into a pure problem-solving drill where you are measured against optimal play, not opponent error.

Very few things make you smarter, and nothing you do for a few minutes on a screen is going to. What Triad offers instead is concrete: a sharp, repeatable workout for planning, inhibition and flexibility, the kind of deliberate engagement the long-term evidence quietly favours, and a few minutes of real focus in a day that is short on them. That is a better deal than most apps on your phone can deliver, so play a game and spend the effort.

References

• Simons, D. J., et al. (2016). Do “Brain-Training” Programs Work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
• Stanford Center on Longevity & Max Planck Institute for Human Development (2014). A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community.
• Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Near and Far Transfer in Cognitive Training: A Second-Order Meta-Analysis. Collabra: Psychology, 5(1).
• 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.
• A game-factors approach to cognitive benefits from video-game training: A meta-analysis (2023). PLoS ONE. (63 studies; overall g ≈ 0.25.)
• Nouchi, R., et al. (2012). Brain Training Game Improves Executive Functions and Processing Speed in the Elderly: A Randomized Controlled Trial. PLoS ONE.
• Game-based brain training for improving cognitive function in community-dwelling older adults: A systematic review and meta-regression (2020).
• Yates, L. A., et al. (2016). Cognitive leisure activities and future risk of cognitive impairment and dementia: systematic review and meta-analysis. International Psychogeriatrics, 28(11).

This article summarises peer-reviewed findings for general interest. It is not medical advice. References are provided so you can check the claims yourself.