Games for engineers that actually exercise engineering

Most lists of games for engineers are lists of games engineers happen to like. This one is organised by what each game actually trains, because those are different questions and only one of them is useful.

The test for inclusion is simple: can the entry be given an honest one-line answer to “what faculty does this exercise?” Minecraft cannot, however many engineers play it. Nine can, and they are below. Each entry says what it trains, what it is good for, and what it is not — including ours, which is listed here on the same terms as the rest and marked as ours where it appears.

• Name This Part

  OURS
  TRAINS · COMPONENT RECOGNITION

  A photograph of an engineering component appears with one part singled out, and you name it against three plausible alternatives before the clock runs out. The wrong options are same-family, different-member — pipe wrench against monkey wrench against basin wrench — so getting it right means reading jaw geometry rather than ruling out obviously unrelated objects. Free, browser-based, no sign-up, and a round takes about ninety seconds.

  This is our own site, so treat the recommendation accordingly. It trains one narrow thing: putting a name to a physical part on sight.

• Kerbal Space Program

  TRAINS · ORBITAL MECHANICS AND VEHICLE DESIGN

  You build rockets and aircraft from parts with real mass, thrust and drag, and fly them under a physics model that is genuinely unforgiving about delta-v budgets, staging and centre-of-mass. More working engineers have developed an intuition for orbital transfers from this game than from any textbook, because it makes the counterintuitive result — that slowing down raises your orbit's opposite side — something you feel rather than derive.

  Paid, and the learning curve is steep enough that most people need a tutorial series alongside it.

• Factorio

  TRAINS · THROUGHPUT, BOTTLENECKS AND SYSTEM DESIGN

  A factory-building game that is, underneath, a sustained exercise in production engineering: balancing line rates, finding the constraint, deciding when to buffer and when to widen, and managing the complexity of a system you built yourself and can no longer hold in your head. The lessons transfer directly to real manufacturing and to any queueing system.

  Paid, and famously difficult to stop playing.

• Poly Bridge and Bridge Constructor

  TRAINS · STRUCTURAL INTUITION

  Both put a span in front of you, a budget, and a load that has to cross. You learn where a member goes into tension and where into compression by watching your bridge fail in the specific way your design guaranteed it would. It is not a substitute for a statics course, but it builds the intuition a statics course assumes you already have.

  Paid, though usually inexpensive. The physics is simplified and the failure modes are more dramatic than real ones.

• Opus Magnum

  TRAINS · MECHANISM AND MOTION DESIGN

  You program mechanical arms to build molecules, and the game scores you on cost, cycle time and footprint at once — the same three-way trade every real machine designer makes. Optimising a solution here feels precisely like optimising a pick-and-place cell, including the part where a clever idea turns out to cost more in cycle time than it saves in area.

  Paid. Puzzle-shaped rather than simulation-shaped, so the mechanisms are abstract.

• Shenzhen I/O

  TRAINS · EMBEDDED ELECTRONICS AND COST ENGINEERING

  You design small circuits from real-feeling components with a datasheet you are expected to read, write assembly for them, and are graded on part cost and power draw. It is the closest a game has come to the actual experience of being handed a spec, a budget, and a set of parts that almost fit.

  Paid, and it genuinely requires reading the manual, which is the point and also the barrier.

• Besiege

  TRAINS · MACHINE BUILDING AND FAILURE MODES

  You assemble siege engines from blocks, joints, springs and power sources and watch them come apart. It is far less rigorous than Kerbal Space Program, and it is the best available demonstration that a structure fails at the joint you did not think about rather than the member you sized.

  Paid. Deliberately silly, and the physics is arcade-grade.

• Nandgame

  TRAINS · DIGITAL LOGIC FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES

  You start with a NAND gate and build upwards — latches, adders, registers, an ALU, eventually a working computer. Free, runs in a browser, and it is the fastest route from knowing that a CPU is made of transistors to understanding how.

  Free. Electronics rather than mechanical, and it stops where the interesting mechanical questions start.

• Algodoo

  TRAINS · PHYSICAL INTUITION AND RAPID WHAT-IF

  A free 2D physics sandbox where you draw shapes, hinge them, spring them, and see what happens. It is not a game with objectives, and that is its use: it is the fastest way to check whether a linkage does what you think it does before you commit to CAD.

  Free. Two-dimensional and not a substitute for real simulation — treat results as intuition, never as analysis.

Common questions

We have no commercial relationship with anything listed here except our own game, which is marked. Nothing on this page is a paid placement. If something belongs on the list and is not, tell us. See also how to learn engineering parts and the tool identification quiz.