When you open Brainbean (Tanner Christensen, 2014), you’re greeted with eight possible brain-stimulating games (plus a “Surprise me!” option). Each game gives you sixty seconds to complete a challenge; you can read a brief description and watch a demonstration of each by tapping the information icon.

In "Letter List," see how many words you can think of that start with a certain letter. "Incomplete Drawing" gives you a few lines and lets you add to a picture. "Remote Association" asks, “What one word can be added to the one below?" "Pattern Tiles" displays most of a pattern and asks you to choose which shape best completes it.



In "Word Scramble," create as many four-letter words as you can from a set group of letters. "Mosaic Drawing" starts with a solid block made of lots of colored squares, and you can make a design by tapping the squares to resize them. "Lost Connections" asks you to rearrange tiles to reconnect the colored wires on them. And "Block Builder" lets you “build” with Lego-like blocks by dragging them.

The app encourages brain training in a wide variety of ways. And I do mean encourages: there are constant messages like “Great!,” “Keep going!,” and even “You look nice today!” (Okay...) The app will tell you gently if you, say, try to spell a nonexistent word (“Did you make that up?”), but the affirmations keep coming...even if you happen to be a reviewer who’s just thrown a game to see what would happen. In any case, there’s plenty of exercise here for verbal as well as well as visual thinking, and thus different strengths get a chance to shine. (I didn’t need to try to lose at "Lost Connections," but I’ll take on anyone at "Letter List.")

I was a little confused by the scoring. In some of the games, success is easily quantified, but how is the score computed in an open-ended activity like "Incomplete Drawing"? A few other little things gave me pause, too. For one, the instructions for "Remote Association" were somewhat unclear. “What one word can be added to the one below?” Did that mean the answers all had to be compound words? (They didn’t — any new word formed from the original worked. To be fair, the description found by tapping the information icon was a little clearer.) "Letter List" didn’t seem to recognize contractions, and "Word Scramble" flat-out failed to recognize a few simple words. (Take and hope are words, right?)

The sound is unobtrusive — the app has happy, chirpy ring when you do something right, a few low tones when your minute is almost up, and not much else. There’s no sound for when you get something wrong, which I appreciated both for the positivity factor and because when apps do have WRONNNNNNNG sounds, they’re usually pretty irritating.

Overall, Brainbean is an addictive way to exercise a variety of mental muscles. It just needs to work out a few kinks.

Available for iPad (requires iOS 6.0 or later); $0.99. Recommended for intermediate users and up.