// θ¨δΊ ARTICLES
Kai-awase, Taiko, Anzan, Nurikabe: every game in MyRin has a Japanese name, and most of them carry a piece of history. Here is what each one means and where it comes from.
MyRin's three memory games look similar at first glance. They are not. One tests what you can memorise in a few seconds, one tests what you can track as you go, and one tests order. Here is how to use each.
MyRin has six games built on numbers, from relaxed equation puzzles to falling sums under pressure. They train different things. Here is how they compare and which to start with.
Move things between containers until each holds one kind. All three MyRin sorting puzzles start from that idea, then change one thing that makes each a different game. Here is what changes, and how to play each.
Each of the three path puzzles in MyRin can be solved by trial and error. Each also has one idea that makes trial and error unnecessary. Here is that idea for each game.
Every speed game has the same trap: go faster and you make more mistakes, slow down and the clock beats you. Here is how that tradeoff works, and how to improve both at once in five MyRin games.
You do not need to install anything to try MyRin. Ten of its games run in any browser, free, with no account. Here is what each one is, what it tests, and which to try first.
A hard level is worth five easy ones, and a 30-day streak more than doubles everything. Here is the arithmetic behind MyRin XP, and what it means for how you should play.
MyRin was designed for adults, but many of its games work well for children and even better played together. Here is which games suit which ages, and how to make puzzle time a shared habit.
With 30 games to choose from, it is easy to just tap whatever looks fun. That is fine. But if you have a goal in mind, a short routine built around it works better. Here are five.
Most adults reach for a phone to split a bill or work out a discount. These ten tricks, each with a worked example, make everyday arithmetic fast enough to do in your head.
You have probably heard that humans now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. The number has no real source. The real story about attention is more interesting, and more useful.
Working memory can only hold a few things at once. Chunking makes each of those things bigger. It is the simplest memory technique there is, and the one experts rely on most.
Hiragana is the first wall every Japanese learner hits, and it is much lower than it looks. With the right order and short daily sessions, most people can read all 46 characters within a week.
Memory Match is the game people underestimate. Watch a round play out, then work through the five free browser levels with a move budget for each one, and you will see why the 12 pair board is a different game from the 4 pair board.
Reaction Speed has one input and no strategy, which is exactly why it is hard to score well on. Here is what the five free rounds measure, what the grade thresholds are in milliseconds, and the two habits that cost most players fifty milliseconds.
The Sangaku demo gives you five tablets with a missing value and four choices each. The answers are easy. The method that makes the answers automatic, inverting the operation instead of testing the options, is the part worth learning.
Every level of Sequence is the same question: what rule generated these numbers? There is a fixed order of tests that identifies almost any rule you will meet, and the five free demo levels happen to cover four different rule families.
Arithmetic Blitz gives you seven seconds per question and a keypad, which means column arithmetic will not fit. Here is every question in the free demo and the shortcut that makes each level survivable.
Flip Match has no clock. Your only score is how many turns you spent, which turns the game into an information problem: every turn should either close a pair or buy you a coordinate you did not have.
The five free levels of Simon Says run two, three, four, five and six steps. That sounds like a gentle ramp, and it is not, because the level with a repeated drum breaks the strategy that got you through the first three.
Every Balance Scale level is one subtraction. What makes the game worth playing is the beam: it tilts by how wrong you were and in which direction, which turns a bare arithmetic answer into feedback you can actually read.
The browser demo gives you five scrambled words and no hint, which sounds harder and is actually the better way to learn. Here is the cluster first method, applied to all five, including the seven letter one that ends the set.
Kana Scout times how long you take to find one odd glyph in a grid of identical ones. The five free levels climb from a nine cell grid to twenty five, and the last two pairs differ by a single stroke.
Pattern Matching shows a reference pattern and four options. One option correctly matches or continues it. The mistake most players make is trying to evaluate the whole pattern at once. Here's the faster approach.
Mental Rotation asks you to match a 3D shape to a rotated version of itself. It's one of the most studied cognitive tasks in neuroscience, and one of the most trainable. Here's what happens in your brain when you rotate objects mentally, and why one specific technique makes it dramatically faster.
Block Puzzle gives you three shapes and a 10Γ10 grid. The goal is to clear lines to reach a target. The most common way to fail isn't placing pieces wrong, it's not thinking three pieces ahead before placing the first one.
Simon Says presents an expanding sequence of colored flashes and asks you to replay them in exact order. It looks simple. The reason it becomes hard, and the reason targeted practice makes it much easier, is working memory.
Sudoku is not a trial-and-error puzzle. Every cell has exactly one correct digit, reachable through constraint logic. Here's the systematic toolkit, naked singles, cross-hatching, and box-line reduction, that makes any Sudoku solvable.
2048 feels like a game of luck. It isn't. A small number of strategic principles eliminate most of the randomness, the corner strategy, monotone stacking, and controlled spawning together give you a consistent path to the target tile.
Arithmetic Blitz drops one equation at a time with a countdown. Each correct answer adds time; each wrong one costs it. The techniques that make high scores possible aren't about memorizing tables, they're about computing smarter, not harder.
Memory Match briefly reveals all cards, then hides them. You find pairs by remembering what you saw. Most players try to remember the cards. The technique that actually works is remembering their positions, and the difference is significant.
Number Sequence shows you a series with one value missing. The challenge isn't arithmetic, it's recognizing which kind of pattern the sequence follows. A four-step method handles every case systematically, without guessing.
Speed Sort gives you a card and a shrinking timer. Swipe left or right to sort it into one of two categories before time runs out. The players who score highest don't think faster, they eliminate the thinking entirely. Here's how.
There is a mathematical rule that tells you exactly where to start every One Line puzzle, before drawing a single stroke. Once you know it, stuck levels become solved levels.
Color Sort becomes unwinnable in seconds if you move without thinking. The players who never get stuck use one rule before touching anything, here's what it is.
The word "RED" printed in blue ink. Your brain reads the word automatically, then has to override it to tap the correct color. That conflict is the Stroop effect, and training through it builds one of the most important cognitive skills there is.
Competitive karuta players train for years to react within 0.1 seconds to a poem's opening syllable. MyRin's Rin Karuta game brings that speed-reading tradition to mobile, and the culture behind it is as rich as the gameplay.
Kakuro is a crossword where every row and column must sum to a clue, with no digit repeated. It's harder than it sounds, and significantly more mathematically interesting than Sudoku.
Two Nikoli puzzle classics, one where you build bridges, one where you carve rivers, both requiring the same patient deductive logic that defines Japanese puzzle craft.
Japan has words for things that Western productivity culture handles badly: the daily practice that compounds over years, the obsessive commitment to craft, the reason for getting out of bed. Here's how they apply to training your brain.
Hundreds of millions of Japanese people draw omikuji, fortune slips, at shrines and temples each year. The tradition is over a thousand years old, uses haiku poetry, and carries a philosophy about luck that differs sharply from Western ideas about it. MyRin implements the full system.
Tower of Hanoi has been used in cognitive research for 50 years. It's the most reliable test of frontal lobe planning ability we have. Here's what the puzzle actually measures, and the one recursive insight that makes every level trivial.
Japan has an aesthetic that finds beauty in cracked bowls, fading seasons, and moss-covered stones. It also has something important to say about how to handle the levels in MyRin you can't solve yet.
Attention is one of the most trainable cognitive skills - if you are training the right type. Here's what cognitive research says about sustained, selective, and divided attention, and how puzzle mechanics develop each one.
Processing speed - how fast your brain translates input into action - declines with age and affects nearly every cognitive task. Puzzle games that require timed decisions are one of the few interventions with real evidence behind them.
MyRin and Elevate take fundamentally different approaches to cognitive training. One trains the way your brain solves problems; the other trains academic-style verbal and math skills. Here's the honest comparison.
Spatial reasoning - the ability to think in three dimensions, mentally rotate objects, and understand how shapes relate to each other - is one of the strongest predictors of real-world problem solving. MyRin trains it in ways most players don't notice.
Many MyRin players report that their most focused sessions happen right before bed. The conventional advice says screens before sleep are bad. The full picture is more complicated.
Every design decision in MyRin came from a specific principle. Here are the five that shaped the most important choices - and one decision we made that went against conventional mobile game wisdom.
Shipping one app is hard. Shipping two in the same year - in different categories, for different audiences - teaches you things that a single launch never would. Here is the honest version of what we learned.
"Brain training" is used to describe everything from Sudoku to card matching to N-back memory tasks. These are not the same thing. Here is what each type actually trains - and which is more useful.
The hardest MyRin levels are not harder because they require more intelligence. They are harder because they require a different approach. Here are the strategies that work when obvious methods stop working.
Players frequently describe puzzle games as calming - even challenging ones. That experience turns out to have a well-documented psychological mechanism behind it. Here is what the research shows.
Adults over 50 are the fastest-growing segment of brain training app users. The question is whether the apps they're using are actually doing anything useful - and the honest answer is more nuanced than either the marketing or the critics suggest.
The App Store has hundreds of brain training apps and most are not worth your time. Here is an honest comparison of six that are, what each is genuinely good for, and the one promise none of them can keep.
We built MyRin. We have also used Lumosity. Here is an honest side-by-side of how they differ - on the science, the design, and the experience of actually playing them.
Attention spans aren't shrinking because people are weaker than they used to be. They're shrinking because almost every digital product is engineered to fragment them. Logic puzzles are one of the few that work the other direction.
Dementia prevention claims by brain training apps are almost always overstated. But the honest picture of what cognitive training does for aging brains is more interesting - and more encouraging - than the marketing deserves.
Every level in MyRin is placed where it is for a specific reason. Behind the puzzle sequence is a structured cognitive curriculum - here's what it's teaching and why.
Feeling stuck in MyRin is almost never about the puzzle being too hard. It's almost always about using the wrong approach. Here's a systematic method that works on any level.
Working memory capacity is one of the strongest predictors of learning speed and problem-solving ability. It's also more trainable than most people assume.
Crosswords have a reputation as the gold standard of brain training. The research tells a more complicated story - one that logic puzzles handle better.
Of all the cognitive abilities that separate fast learners from slow ones, pattern recognition sits near the top. It's also the most trainable - and the skill MyRin is most directly built around.
Consistency beats intensity in cognitive training. Research shows that daily short sessions outperform occasional long ones - but only if you're doing them right.
Not all MyRin puzzles are the same kind of hard. Knowing which puzzle type you're facing - and the approach each requires - turns frustrating dead-ends into solvable challenges.
Three mistakes almost every new MyRin player makes - and the mental habits that separate players who get stuck from players who keep advancing.
Cognitive training apps promise a sharper mind in minutes a day. The research on whether they deliver is messier than the marketing suggests - but more encouraging than the critics claim.
Most brain training apps optimize for feeling productive, not being productive. Here are the five habits that actually move the needle - backed by learning science and built into MyRin.
Too easy and players feel bored. Too hard and they quit. Here is a look inside the design process we use to hit the narrow window between those two failures - across every one of MyRin's 1000+ levels.
The average human reaction time to a visual stimulus is 200 to 250 milliseconds. Elite athletes and fighter pilots measure closer to 150 ms. The difference is not genetics, it is trained neural efficiency. Here is how Reaction Speed in MyRin builds exactly that.
Visual search is one of the most studied cognitive tasks in experimental psychology. Finding the odd one out in a field of similar items uses the same selective attention systems that let you read in a noisy room or spot a friend in a crowd. MyRin trains it deliberately.
Nexus has one rule that most players miss: you cannot leave a single cell empty. That constraint transforms what looks like a free-form drawing puzzle into a pure logic problem with a provably unique solution. Here is how to read it that way.
Between 1603 and 1868, Japanese mathematicians of all social classes solved geometric puzzles and hung them as offerings at Shinto shrines. The practice was called sangaku. MyRin's Math Puzzle game, named Sangaku in-app, is a tribute to this extraordinary tradition.
In kendo and Zen practice, the highest performance state is called mushin, "empty mind." In the 1990s, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described the same state as flow. They are describing the same neural phenomenon from two different centuries and two different cultures.
The Japanese concept of shu-ha-ri describes three stages every genuine learner passes through: follow the rule exactly, break the rule deliberately, transcend the rule entirely. Understanding which stage you are in, and why rushing is the main failure mode, changes how you practice.
MyRin's rank progression runs from θ¦ηΏγ (Minarai, apprentice) to 倩δΈδΊΊ (Tenkabito, Ruler of All Under Heaven). Each of the 40 ranks has a Japanese name, a meaning, and a wisdom sentence drawn from authentic martial arts and cultural tradition. Here is what they all mean.
Every Balance Scale puzzle has a single missing weight that levels both pans. Finding it is pure algebraic reasoning, no trial and error required. Here is how to read these puzzles as equations and solve them directly.
Kana Scout presents a grid of Japanese katakana characters and asks you to find the one that is different. The game is a visual attention training tool, and an accidental but effective way to begin learning to read Japanese script.
Nine Grid presents a 9Γ9 board and asks you to fill 3Γ3 sections without leaving isolated cells. It is a spatial reasoning puzzle with a key insight: the winning move is usually not the immediately obvious one. Here is how to read the grid correctly.
MyRin's in-app description of Word Scramble is three words: "Rearrange the letters. Start from the suffix." That is the entire strategy, compressed. Here is why the suffix approach works and what to do when it doesn't.
Go has fewer rules than chess and more depth than almost any game ever invented. Here are the complete rules, a worked 9x9 opening, and the three mistakes every beginner makes.
Shogi is chess where captured pieces change sides and come back to the board as your own. Here are the complete rules, every piece and its moves, and the one idea that makes the game feel entirely new.
If you searched for Mindigo and landed here, you are in the right place. The app was renamed MyRin in 2026. This is what changed, what stayed exactly the same, and what the new name means.
Riichi mahjong is the Japanese form of the four-player tile game: 136 tiles, a hand of four sets and a pair, and one dramatic declaration that locks your hand and doubles the tension. Here are the rules you need for your first table.
Hanafuda are 48 small cards painted with the flowers of the twelve months, and Koi-Koi is the game most people play with them. Here are the deck, the rules, the yaku, and the one decision the game is named after.
Most adults react to a visual signal in roughly a quarter of a second. Here is what "average" really means, how it changes with age, what slows it down, and how much practice can realistically buy back.
A reader chants the first half of a thousand-year-old poem and two players lunge for the card that carries the second half. Competitive karuta is memory, hearing and reflex in one sport. Here is how it works.
Sudoku is American by birth and Japanese by upbringing. The publisher that raised it, Nikoli, also gave the world Kakuro, Hashi, Nurikabe and a design philosophy that still defines a good logic puzzle.
MyRin ships with a full ebook. This is what is in it, part by part, with a worked example from the Go chapter, and how to read it without paying anything.
They look like cousins and they are not. Sudoku never asks you to add anything. Kakuro is a crossword built from sums. The difference changes which part of your thinking gets a workout.
Most people assume fewer starting numbers means a harder puzzle. It does not. Difficulty comes from which solving technique the grid forces you to reach for, and that is something a designer chooses.
Hashiwokakero has four rules and no arithmetic beyond counting to eight. The skill is knowing which islands are forced from the first glance, and how the connection rule quietly decides the ending.
Nurikabe asks you to paint a wall around islands of white. Three rules, one of which quietly does most of the work: the wall must never form a 2 by 2 block.
Chess has six piece types and a rulebook. Go has one kind of stone and about four rules. Yet Go resisted computers for two decades longer, and the reason says something interesting about both games.
Shogi looks like chess with unfamiliar pieces. Then you learn that captured pieces come back fighting for whoever took them, and every instinct a chess player owns stops working.
Holding a phone number in mind is short term memory. Holding it while working out whether the area code matches your friend is working memory. The gap between those two is where most everyday cognitive strain lives.
Show someone the word RED printed in blue ink and ask for the colour. They will hesitate. That hesitation has been measured since 1935 and it reveals something permanent about how automatic skills work.
Most brain training apps described as free are trials. Here are the four paywall patterns, the questions that expose them in under a minute, and what to look for instead.
Hanafuda is a deck of 48 cards, twelve months of four. Koi-Koi is the game most people meet first, and it is one of many. Here is what else the deck plays, and why it looks the way it does.
One 2008 paper suggested a memory exercise could raise fluid intelligence. It launched an industry and a long argument. Here is what the task is, what the evidence says now, and what to do with that.
A crossword asks whether you know a word. A Sudoku asks whether you can work something out. That single difference explains why Japanese logic puzzles travelled across languages and crosswords never could.
Shuzan drops equations from the top of the board and gives you until they land to answer. Here is how the game works on each difficulty, which equation to answer first, and the soroban habits that make the arithmetic faster.
Temari is a sorting puzzle dressed in one of Japan's oldest crafts. The rules take ten seconds to learn; hard mode, where you only see the top ball of each tube, takes real planning. Here is how to solve both.
Kamon asks you to sort Japanese family crests, and on hard mode every crest is the same gold. Here is how to read sakura, kikyo, uroko and yotsume by outline, how the puzzle works, and where the crests come from.
Every wire piece in Infinity Loop starts turned the wrong way. Random tapping eventually works on small boards and never on large ones. Here is the deduction method: piece types, real orientation counts, and solving from the edges inward.
Flip Match is the classic pairs game with no preview: every position you know, you learned by flipping. Here is the flipping order that wastes the fewest taps and the quadrant method that makes positions stick.