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Many of us drop in at the gym regularly to keep our bodies fit and flexible, but what about our minds? Strategy games provide one of the best workouts going for keeping the brain in shape — and they can be a ton of fun.

What makes a game mind-bending? The best games demand both rigorous thinking and finely tuned intuition to outwit a human or computer opponent. The games may allow for subtle feints or include unexpected twists. What finally marks mind-bending strategy games is that they keep you engaged — they’re so involving that you don’t want to stop playing.

• Axis & Allies: Axis & Allies is a board game that recreates the campaigns of WWII on a strategic level. If you thought the Allies victory in the war was inevitable, a game like Axis & Allies teaches that victory is really the result of hundreds of strategy decisions and that at many points the course of the war might have changed.
• DVONN: DVONN is an abstract, two-player game with very simple rules and incredibly complex possibilities. What makes the game a mind-bender is that everything can change right up to the last move.
• Arimaa: In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated chess champion Garry Kasperov. The event inspired computer scientist Omar Syed to invent a new game that was simple to learn but so strategically complex that no computer could master it. As of early 2010, no computer has.

Full list at HowStuffWorks.com.

Total aggregation of HowStuffWorks.com.

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