Word Labyrinth

Are Word Games Good for Your Brain?

By the Word Labyrinth team at CoreDL d.o.o. · 17 June 2026

People ask me this in support emails and app reviews, usually in a hopeful tone, and I always want to give a better answer than the one on the app store. So here it is. Word games are good for some things and overrated for others, and since I make a word ladder game for a living, you should read what follows knowing I have a stake in it.

Three questions hiding in one

"Good for your brain" bundles three claims that have almost nothing to do with each other. Does the puzzle feel good and hold your attention? Does it make you measurably better at something, like recalling words or holding a goal in mind? And the one people really mean: does it protect you from decline or dementia later in life?

The first is obviously true of any game you keep playing. The second is true in a narrow way I'll get to. The third is where the evidence gets thin, and it's also the one that sells. When a game site says its puzzle "boosts your brain", it is borrowing the credibility of claim three to sell claim one. I try not to do that, and this post is partly me checking my own copy.

The crossword trial everyone quotes

If you've read any article on this topic in the last few years, you've met one study: a randomised trial published in NEJM Evidence in 2022, led by D. P. Devanand at Columbia with colleagues at Duke. Older adults who already had mild cognitive impairment (measurable memory trouble, short of dementia) were assigned either to computerised crosswords or to a commercial brain-training suite, and followed for well over a year. The crossword group did a little better on a standard cognitive scale, and their brain scans showed a little less shrinkage.

That's a real, peer-reviewed result, and I was pleased to read it. Now look at what it doesn't say. Everyone in it was already impaired. There was no "do nothing" group, so it can't tell you whether crosswords beat ordinary life, only that they held up against a product built to train brains. It tested crosswords, not word ladders or anagrams or anything else. And the effect was modest. My honest summary after reading the paper twice: a familiar word puzzle did at least as well as a purpose-built brain trainer. That is a reason to keep doing the puzzle you like. It is not a prescription.

Cognitive reserve, and the chicken-and-egg problem

The idea behind most of the "puzzles and aging" research is cognitive reserve, a term that comes largely from Yaakov Stern's work. Two people can have similar damage on a scan while one has obvious symptoms and the other is coping fine. Reserve is the name for the buffer. Education, demanding work, reading, languages, music and an active social life all seem to add to it, and people with richer mental lives tend, on average, to show dementia symptoms later.

The caveat that wellness copy always drops: nearly all of that evidence is observational. People whose brains are already healthier are also more likely to seek out crosswords and books in the first place, so when a long-running study finds that puzzle-doers age better, you can't tell how much the puzzles did and how much was already there. Both things can be true at once. The careful position, which is roughly where groups like Alzheimer's Research UK land, is that staying mentally and socially active is a sensible part of looking after your brain, and that no single activity has been shown to prevent disease.

Training mostly trains the thing you trained

This is the part I'd most like players to understand, because it applies to my game as much as anyone's. Practising a task makes you better at that task and at things very close to it. Psychologists call it the transfer problem, and the brain-training industry has been living with it for a decade. In 2014 a large group of cognitive scientists signed a public statement saying the evidence for everyday benefits from brain-training products was weak; a thorough review published two years later went through the studies one by one and reached the same conclusion. The big ACTIVE trial in older adults found the same pattern: train memory and your memory test score goes up, train speed and your speed score goes up, and the gains mostly stay in their lane.

I've played a few thousand ladders. I am fast at ladders now. I am not noticeably better at remembering names, and I still lose my keys. Word puzzles are more pleasant and more language-rich than abstract brain trainers, but they are not exempt from this.

What a ladder does use

Set the grand claims aside and look at the mechanics. You have to hold the target in mind while you test moves, which is close to the textbook definition of working memory. You have to find "a real four-letter word one letter away from COLD", which is a harder retrieval task than recognising a word on a page, because you're searching your vocabulary by shape rather than meaning. And on a good solve you plan two or three rungs ahead, often from both ends.

COLD → CORD → WORD → WARD → WARM

To find that in four steps you hold WARM as the goal, pull up CORD and WORD as bridges, and spot that WARD is one letter from both WORD and the target. A longer one works the same muscles harder:

HEAD → HEAL → TEAL → TELL → TALL → TAIL

None of that is exotic. I'd put it in the same bin as reading a dense article or doing the sums in your head at a market stall: good for you in the way that using your mind is good for you, not in the way a medicine is. If you want to get better at the planning side, the strategy tips go into it.

The things that actually move the needle

The Lancet Commission on dementia keeps a list of risk factors you can do something about. It includes hearing loss, high blood pressure, smoking, physical inactivity, diabetes, heavy drinking, depression and social isolation. Puzzles are not on it. If you had to choose between a daily crossword and a daily walk with a friend, the walk wins on the evidence, and it isn't close.

So a word game is a nice addition to a healthy routine. It is never a substitute for sleep, movement, people and a blood-pressure check.

Then why play at all

Because the realistic benefits are still worth having, and because the puzzle is fun, which turns out to matter more than it sounds. Whatever modest good a puzzle does comes from regular, low-friction engagement, not from a three-hour binge once a month. Difficulty is the active ingredient: a puzzle you never pause on is pleasant and does little, while one that makes you plan and occasionally fail is where the work happens. And you only keep up the habit you enjoy.

That is why the daily set in Word Labyrinth is 5 puzzles and then it stops. A short ritual you finish fits into a life; an infinite feed doesn't.

What I'd tell a friend

  1. Do one puzzle most days, at a time that already exists in your routine: coffee, the commute, before bed.
  2. Pick a difficulty that makes you think for a moment. If you never pause, nudge it harder. Expert mode exists for exactly this.
  3. Walk, sleep and see people first. The puzzle is the top-up.
  4. Don't let anyone, including me, sell it to you as a cure.

Make it your small daily ritual

5 new word ladders every day, done in a few minutes. Gently hard, then finished.

Play Word Labyrinth

Sources & further reading

If you'd rather read the research than take my word for it:

A note: this is general information about research, not medical advice. It can't tell you anything about your own risk. If you're worried about your memory or someone else's, talk to a doctor, not a puzzle page.

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