People use fast and flat simulation to reason about new games

People can guess how fun or fair a brand new board game will be, even before they play it once. More than 1,000 people tried 121 different two-player strategy games. Almost all of these games were new to them. They still played smartly from the very first try. They could also judge a game's fairness or fun level before making a single move. Scientists explain this skill with a new brain model. They call it the "Intuitive Gamer." This model imagines just a few likely next moves. It does not calculate every possible outcome, like a computer would. This quick, shallow kind of thinking seems to match how people naturally reason.

Integrity screen: passed (3 checks) Checked 28 July 2026. Retraction record: none. DOI resolves at doi.org. Metadata record found (Nature). Read the source

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