Strategic thinking using games
A course designed to improve your cognitive skills using games as the curriculum.
Your kid rushes everything, and makes the same mistake twice. Your students leave a lesson without picking up the skill it was meant to build. Your team had a strong offsite, then went back to old habits inside a fortnight.
You already know what skill you want to build. What you do not have is a thing to do on Sunday afternoon, on Tuesday after lunch, or in week one of the next quarter.
This page is that thing. Twelve sessions. Six modules. One game a week. Three add-on paths for going deeper. A free option on every session, so cost is not the gate.
Skills are practised, not lectured. The same way a piano scale is. Pick a game, run it as a session, do the debrief. Then pick the next one.
"I want them to learn to plan, not just react. What do we play on Sundays?"
"Critical thinking is in my syllabus. Show me a Tuesday afternoon that builds it."
"One offsite is a memory. I need a four-month arc the team can feel."
The whole landscape, on one page
Strategic thinking is not one skill. It is a landscape. The map below shows every category, every sub-category, and every individual skill we score games against. Coloured chips are the skills the course covers. Faded chips are still in the database. They are available for other paths.
Skill, task, mechanic, game
Every skill has a cognitive task behind it. The task is the move your brain has to make to use the skill. Game mechanics are how we get the brain to make that move again and again, in low-stakes conditions, with feedback. Pick a skill on the left to see the chain.
Specific skill
Practice chain
What a single session looks like
A skill does not develop because someone played a game once. It develops because the play is bracketed by setup, observation, and reflection. The five phase boxes below are the same shape our lesson generator produces. The proportions are the point. Gameplay is the loud part. Reflection is where the skill sticks.
Gameplay is the loud part. Reflection is the part that makes the skill stick. About a tenth of the session does most of the transfer.
The curriculum
Six modules. Twelve weeks. One game a week. The arc moves from seeing, to planning, to relating, to resourcing, to executing, to adapting. That is the same order a strategic move actually unfolds in. Each module is two weeks. Each week is one focus skill, one suggested game, and one free or open-source alternative.
Strategic Thinking · A 12-week course
Six modules. One skill per week. Free option on every session.
Add-on paths
The 12-week core is a foundation, not a ceiling. Three add-on paths extend it sideways. Each is four sessions. Each session names a focus skill and lists two or three nearby skills it also exercises.
What to do on Monday
Three things that make this work in practice.
Pick one skill, not five.
Open the diagnostic. Find the sub-category you score weakest in. Start with the module that covers it. Trying to build the whole landscape at once is how you build none of it.
Always do the debrief.
The play is the practice. The debrief is the learning. Five minutes of "What did you try? What did you change your mind about?" is what makes the skill stick. Skip it and the session was just a game night.
Repeat before you progress.
Most of the gain is on the second pass. Run the same session twice with the same group before moving on. Do not optimise for variety. Optimise for the move you can make twice.
The Shortlist diagnostic gives you a starting point in five to ten minutes. The skill builder lets you pick what you want to develop and shows you the games that develop it. Strategic thinking is a skill. Do not outsource it. Practise it.
Download the course
Pop in your email and we will send you a printable copy of all twelve sessions, with the games, the lesson scaffold, and the debrief prompts. Free, no spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Want the lesson packs to go with it?
The Shortcourse Companion bundle gives you printable lesson packs for every skill and mechanic the course points at, scaffolded for upper-primary, lower-secondary, and upper-secondary classrooms. 60+ PDFs, plus the rendered course PDF.
See the Companion bundle