Chinese chess, surprisingly rare in many Western countries, but has very in depth strategy.
Settlers of Catan (the original. Most of the expansions just make things more complicated)- warning is a bit addictive.
Sprouts- an amusing game due to Conway.
Illuminati- A very amusing game by Steve Jackson. Can take a bit long.
Ninja Burger- another fun Steve Jackson game.
Note that some other Steve Jackson games aren’t necessarily worth it (for example Munchkin is a lot of fun but is deliberately unbalanced and so isn’t going to work well for the purposes discussed in the top post).
Edit: Thinking about this more, this may in general be a bad idea. Games are designed to be shiny and addictive. Thus, this might be fun but might be bad from an instrumental rationality perspective since it could end up as a large time sink and would superficially seem useful even if it were not helping much at all.
As far as Chinese chess goes, a good amount of skill in Western chess seems to carry over. In particular, the ability to pay attention to the whole board at the same time and remember what’s going on where.
There’s probably some heavy opening theory that I never learned, but that shouldn’t matter unless you’re playing against expert players.
Chinese chess, surprisingly rare in many Western countries, but has very in depth strategy.
Settlers of Catan (the original. Most of the expansions just make things more complicated)- warning is a bit addictive.
Sprouts- an amusing game due to Conway.
Illuminati- A very amusing game by Steve Jackson. Can take a bit long.
Ninja Burger- another fun Steve Jackson game.
Note that some other Steve Jackson games aren’t necessarily worth it (for example Munchkin is a lot of fun but is deliberately unbalanced and so isn’t going to work well for the purposes discussed in the top post).
Edit: Thinking about this more, this may in general be a bad idea. Games are designed to be shiny and addictive. Thus, this might be fun but might be bad from an instrumental rationality perspective since it could end up as a large time sink and would superficially seem useful even if it were not helping much at all.
As far as Chinese chess goes, a good amount of skill in Western chess seems to carry over. In particular, the ability to pay attention to the whole board at the same time and remember what’s going on where.
There’s probably some heavy opening theory that I never learned, but that shouldn’t matter unless you’re playing against expert players.