Ask HN: Games that will teach me new ways of thinking / skills

I have a piece of paper from an academic institution that tells me I'm a smart guy with a huge enjoyment of learning new things. But experience suggests I can exclusively learn new things by actually doing them.

This means I can either struggle through turning technical documentation, textbooks, lectures, and so on, and then go and teach myself how to actually do the things afterwards -- which is hard -- or I can find learning resources that are setup for my style of learning, which is immediately rewarding.

From another thread here on HN, I recently found Human Resource Machine, which I love, and which (sort of) teaches you the basics of interacting with a simple chip. Some of the harder exercises there have caused me to write a little DSL which pretends to be an assembler so that I can solve the problems in an IDE. This has in turn probably piqued my interest enough to actually write some real assembly language.

I want more games that will teach me ways of thinking while having fun. I would rather whatever it teaches me expands my mind a little. I love both Civ and Simcity, but all I'm really learning while playing each is the algebra behind the respective game engines. I'm also not that interested in games that might give me a very shallow snapshot of history -- I'd rather watching a film!

On my short-list so far, from some quick searching:

- Rocksmith 2014 - teaches you guitar

- Dragonbox - apparently has an adult-version of teaching you more algebra

- MS Flight Simulator

- Kerbal Space program - orbital physics

- Duolingo, maybe

Any other recommenations?