Playing board games can be fun, challenging, infuriating and a great way to pass the time. They can also help scientists understand how we solve new problems.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers created brand-new strategy games to see how players reason before tackling games they have no experience with. The goal of this research was to see how people react when they are thrown into an unfamiliar situation.

Most previous studies focused on how experts master games they already know or how massive supercomputers calculate millions of moves. What was missing was how everyday people reason about a game before they play it, which could provide insights into how we make quick decisions about situations we’ve never encountered before.