Iwament
The move you can hand to someone else
Computational thinking is often described so broadly that any puzzle qualifies. A stricter test, from Peter Denning, is whether the next step can be carried out by a model without a person deciding what the step means.
Computational thinking became a public phrase after Jeannette Wing argued, from 2006, that formulating a problem so an information-processing agent can carry out the solution is a general kind of thought. In the definition she later used with Jan Cuny and Larry Snyder, abstraction is the centre: hide what does not matter, and keep a procedure that still works.
The criticism is as useful as the definition. Peter Denning, writing in 2017, argued that the phrase had drifted. Abstraction and breaking a problem apart belong to many kinds of thinking. They do not, by themselves, turn an activity into computing. And a list of steps is not an algorithm when a step still needs a person to judge what it means. An algorithm controls a model.
That is a practical filter for the games on HD Games. Maze, Minesweeper, Mastermind, and 24 Points each ask for a next action that can be stated. Open this cell. Try this code. Use every card once and land on 24. Another person, or a bot, can carry the instruction out. Play AI on the site is that kind of agent. It plays a side. It does not teach the procedure, and it is not a tutor.
A looser claim, that any game builds computational thinking, fails the filter. Enjoying Ludo is a different activity from writing the rule that moves a token. The studio can still care about the stricter version. A later game for computational play should make the procedure visible: what the inputs were, what the step was, what changed. Until that game exists, the practice available now is to finish a round and be able to say, in one sentence, why the last move was legal.
Sources: Wing, "Computational Thinking," Communications of the ACM, 2006; Wing, with Cuny and Snyder, on a definition of computational thinking; Denning, "Remaining Trouble Spots with Computational Thinking," Communications of the ACM, 2017.