The Anatomy of Logic Games

Back to: LSAT Logic Games

Over the next few lessons, we’ll give you a very broad picture of how the LSAT LG section works.

Note: everything we talk about in this lesson on LG basics will be covered in greater detail later, so don’t worry about memorizing everything here. For now, we’re just giving you a mile-high view.

Let’s get started

At base, a logic game really is just a game. We have a playing board and some rules about where you can put the pieces.

Below is an example of a typical logic game prompt. This prompt comes from the sample test available online at http://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source/jd-docs/sampleptjune.pdf.

This is a fairly recent Preptest from June 2007. If you haven’t taken a cold diagnostic LSAT (your first full, timed test, ideally taken without any prior study) yet, I encourage you to take this real, previously administered exam under timed conditions in order familiarize yourself with the test and to establish a baseline score.

Take a moment to browse through the full logic games section on the June 2007 LSAT. On this test, the logic games section is the first of four total sections. The remaining sections include reading comprehension and two logical reasoning sections. On the day of the test, you’ll be expected to do each of these four sections in 35 minutes. Now look again at just section 1, the logic games section.

This section, like every logic games section, has four separate games. A logic games section always consists of four separate games, with 5-8 questions each. Since you have 35 minutes to complete all four logic games, this means that, on average, you have 8 minutes and 45 seconds to complete each game (when you start worrying about timing, which isn’t for a while).

Keep in mind that this is just an average. Some games are easier and should ideally take less time, while other games are so tough that even expert test takers are expected to need more than 9 minutes to solve them correctly.

The first game in any given logic games section is almost always the easiest of the four. The second game tends to be easy or only moderately difficult, and the third and fourth games typically run anywhere from moderately difficult to very hard.

When you start learning the techniques for mastering these games, do not even think about timing yourself yet. In fact, for the first month (or more) that you are learning games, most of the work you do should be untimed.

Now, let’s look at an individual game in more detail. The sample logic game prompt below is the third game in the section, found on page four of the June 2007 LSAT.

Sample Logic Game Prompt

Now here is the same thing labeled by me:

Note: the full game includes a total of 7 questions, but I’ve included only two of the questions associated with this game for illustrative purposes so you can look at a few examples.

I’ve labeled the parts of the game: the scenario, the rules, and the questions. Let’s take a closer look…

The Scenario

The first part, which I’ve labeled “The Scenario,” is where you are given the general rules about how to set the game up.

The scenario is where you learn what type of game you are working on and how it is set up. Don’t worry; there are only two main types of games: ordering and grouping. We’ll be covering these in detail in future lessons.

This particular type of game is called an ordering game (also sometimes called a “linear” game), because the major mental task is determining the order of some items.

Specifically, you are going to be ordering seven voyages in this game. We also get some other rules and restrictions in the scenario: we can only visit one place a week, we have to go to each place at least once, and you can’t have empty weeks. These rules determine what the “game pieces” and the “board” will look like. They are big picture kind of rules. After the scenario, things get a bit more specific.

The Rules

While the scenario has a lot of rules, when you hear people referring to “the rules,” they are most often talking about these more specific rules down here.

These rules start to fill in more details about the game. For example, the second rule in the game above tells us, “Trinidad will be [the ship’s] destination in week 7.” That’s extremely helpful to know. In any valid order for these voyages, Trinidad must be 7th.

While some of these rules may look complicated now, this course will teach you how to handle every rule and understand how they work together. Better still, you’ll learn how to quickly & efficiently represent the rules, so you don’t have to juggle everything in your head.

Everyone, and by that, I mean every single person who does well on the LSAT, uses special techniques to diagram the setup and rules of the game in a way that makes it easier to refer to them at a quick glance. If you think there are super geniuses who just glance at these rules once, see how they fit together, and then see the answers to every problem from there, trust me, there are not.

Here’s a comparable situation: beginning chess players often imagine that master players see the board in their mind all at once. In actuality, even the best chess players in the world process chess positions by understanding tiny chunks of the board made up of maybe 5 to 9 squares. They understand the possibilities within those “chunks” and know how to work with them. Through years of practice and experience, they assimilate thousands of these chunks into their mental repertoire.

Similarly, master LSAT takers do not simply see all the rules working together at once like some complex mental symphony. They break it down into pieces. Luckily, there aren’t thousands upon thousands of patterns to get used to. Also unlike chess, it’s easy to draw pictures that help you keep track of the rules and make them much easier to work with. This leaves you with enough mental processing capacity to solve the questions with comparative ease.

This process is called diagramming. For the next lesson, let’s zoom in on that.