I should get back to Factorio, but Cities Skylines has taken over my brain-game timeslot lately.

It's really amazing to me how fun they both are, given that they're just exercises in logistics.

Cities Skylines is about managing traffic flow, basically every other mechanic stems from that in some way or another. Not a surprise given the developers' previous games were the Cities In Motion series.

Factorio is about efficient transport of materials into machines that assemble goods, and about building up abstractions so you are constantly solving new types of problems with the resources you've automated already.

Both of them have helped me to better understand concurrency, throughput, and optimization. And playing Factorio with friends has helped me stretch my project management muscles. By halfway through the game I had to make a Trello board just to keep track of what needed to be done and where the bottlenecks were.

If you're in the mood for a thinking game I highly recommend both of them.