There has been a debate about the helpfulness of "brain-training" games in improving your brain's ability to comprehend and store information, but if you ask us, it certainly can't hurt any. Word Bubbles is part of a whole suite of brain-training exercises provided by Lumosity. The trick with this type of game is balancing the self-improvement with something fun, which is where Word Bubbles really excels.
The premise is simple: The game gives you the first three letters of a word; you make more words based on these letters. You can chain words of the same length together to get more points. Let's say the game starts you with "mol." As you can see by the screenshot below, we came up with, ahem, "moll," "mollusk," "moles," etc.
It's surprisingly hard to walk away from. Games you can finish in just a couple of minutes somehow become more addictive. This addiction is probably more degenerative on the brain than helpful, but the second we start thinking about chaining together word combos, we get too excited to care.
If you create a free account and start dabbling in the other exercises, you can kill a whole hour or so of your day. While Word Bubbles is certainly our favorite of the exercises, you'll also find a slew of other brain-training games that can be entertaining and offer you the sense you're improving your brain instead of killing it. If you're a word-nerd, you'll love Word Bubbles, but if you're not, you'll find plenty of spatial puzzles, memory exercises and math problems at Lumosity too.
While the critics and scientists debate on the actual helpfulness of these types of games, we'll let you waste away the hours at work at least pretending like you're exercising the most important muscle in your body.
You can play Word Bubbles here, or check out the rest of their collection here.
