8 Classic Games Perfect to Prevent Writer’s Block

If you’re pulling your hair out because you’re stuck writing, we know the feeling. Writer’s block can happen after hours of concentration because you’re mentally taxed. 

Fortunately, there is an easy solution: taking a study break. It’s important to take a regular break every hour so you can keep your mind fresh and ideas flowing. Here are some fun classic games you can play that are perfect for a study break. 

WordSearches

What could be simpler and easier to pick up than a simple word search? You know what to do—check your word bank, and hunt down every word in the puzzle to win!

FreeCell

Freecell Solitaire is a great game to practice patience and focus. In this game, you try to move your cards from eight foundation piles into four sequential suits from ace through king. However, you may only play the top card of each pile, moving cards from pile to pile in alternating colors. You have to use your wits and move carefully to avoid locking yourself out of any possible plays and losing the game!

Spider Solitaire

Spider Solitaire is another form of Solitaire that’s great for practicing your strategic thinking skills. In Spider, you’re trying to arrange all 13 cards in every suit from ace through king by moving cards from piles in sequential order. However, some cards are dealt face down meaning you must use face-up cards before the entire deck is available. Additionally, the game is played with two decks, so you have eight suits in total to stack up before you win the game.

Boggle 

If word games are more your thing, Boggle is a surprisingly simple and fun game to play alone. While Boggle is typically played with other players, you can just as easily compete with yourself to improve your mastery of word puzzles. Simply jumble the letters on the board and play the game normally, tallying your score as you go along. You can even input your board onto a Boggle solver tool online to see how many words were available on your board that you didn’t see!

Sudoku

Sudoku is one of the most popular puzzle games in the world, and it’s so simple that anyone can learn to play it yet so challenging that even the greatest puzzle masters can be stumped by their trickery. Sudoku is played on a 9×9 grid further broken down into smaller 9×9 grids for a total of 81 spaces. Within each grid, your goal is to input the digits 1-9 such that each digit appears only once. However, inside of the larger 9×9 grid, each row and column of 9 spaces must also only contain each digit one time. 

Simply put, you must create sequences of the digits 1-9 across every row and column of the board while inputting the digits only once each inside of each sub-grid. Sudoku puzzles will start you off with a handful of starting digits already filled in, and you must complete your puzzle around these given inputs. 

Mahjong

Mahjong is a tile-based strategy game that has been popular in Asia for centuries. The goal of the game is to collect sets of matching tiles to form hands. As your tiles are picked up, progress through turns and winning combinations are triggered. Players start the game with 13 tiles each. Each player is assigned a wind (West-North-East-South). Five tiles will be placed in each hand upon the start of the game, and then the player picks a tile from the wall. The game proceeds in a counter-clockwise fashion, similar to Yahtzee or The Resistance. Players may choose to discard their turn as well as they seem fit.

Hearts

Hearts is a trick-taking game that requires 4 players, an equal number of decks with Aces high and 2’s low, and a standard 52 playing card deck. The objective of the game is to have as few points as possible when someone reaches 100 points — achieving a winning hand. Each player is dealt cards until each has 13. 

After all the cards are dealt, the pass phase begins. Each player picks three and passes to an opponent. After all the cards have been dealt, the lead player plays a card face-up onto the center of the table. For the first trick, the player holding the 2 of clubs plays it onto the table. Then each player in turn also plays one card from their hand, face-up, onto the center of the table. Once all players have played a card, the player who played the highest card of the suit led wins the trick.

Minesweeper

In this game, you walk through a field littered with hidden mines. You can only advance if you’ve crossed a safe square. There are lots of mines, and you must guess which squares might have mines on them. When guessing, consider the number of surrounding squares that contain mines.

You are presented with a grid of squares. Some squares contain mines, and others don’t. If you click on a square containing a mine, your game ends. If you manage to click all the squares (without clicking on any mines) you win. Clicking a square that doesn’t have a mine reveals the number of neighboring squares containing mines. Use this information plus some guesswork to avoid the mines.