Home > Test Providers > Arctic Shores Assessment: Games, Scoring & Prep Tips
With a game-based format that captures thousands of behavioural data points and an opaque scoring algorithm, the Arctic Shores assessment is a genuinely challenging test to interpret and prepare for.
Instead of asking you to answer long questionnaires, the Arctic Shores assessment uses a series of interactive games to understand how you naturally think, solve problems, and make decisions.
In this article we’ll take a deep-dive into the Arctic Shores game-based assessment: all games explained, the Skill-Enabler model, scoring, and how to actually prepare.
Have questions about the Arctic Shores test? Contact me!
The Arctic Shores Assessment is a game-based psychometric test that usually contains 5 to 10 interactive games, depending on the employer.
Instead of asking you who you are and what you think, Arctic Shores assesses how you actually behave.
While you go through a series of interactive tasks, or games, the assessment collects data to understand how you naturally think, solve problems, and respond in different situations. The results are mapped to Arctic Shores’ Skill-Enablers model to create a comprehensive behavioral and cognitive profile.
Test Structure and Question Format
The assessment usually consists of up to 10 games. Many of these games weren’t originally invented by Arctic Shores, and are based on well-established psychological tests going back decades.
Here is a brief description of each:
Not all candidates are required to take all games – the exact selection depends on your potential employer’s configuration.
Order
The Task: Several frames in a sequence, each containing shapes that vary in colour, size, and position. Determine the characteristics of a missing fourth frame by identifying the underlying logical rule. Each frame must be solved within one minute.
What It Assesses: Logical reasoning, attention to detail, and the ability to extract rules from complex visual information.
Skill-Enablers: Inductive Reasoning and Cognitive Agility
Pro Tip
Solve frames methodically from the simplest attribute (position) to the most complex (combined rules).
Sequence
The Task: Tiles on a 15-tile grid flash in a specific order of increasing length. Memorise and repeat the sequence. Distractor icons are added as the sequences grow longer.
What It Assesses: Short-term memory, information processing efficiency, and the ability to maintain controlled behaviour despite distraction.
Skill-Enabler: Focused Attention
Based on: Corsi Block Test
Pro Tip
Use visual chunking – try to see the overall shape of the pattern rather than memorising individual tiles in order. When distractors appear, ignore them deliberately and stay anchored to the tile grid.
Energy (Power Generator)
The Task: Push four power levers to generate energy and reach a target, but some levers carry a risk of a large energy drain.
What It Assesses: Learning agility, impulsivity, risk tolerance, and pattern recognition.
Skill-Enablers: Learning Agility, Focused Attention, and Persistent Effort
Based on: Iowa Gambling Task
Pro Tip
The first few rounds are for testing, not scoring. Pull each lever at least once to map its risk/reward profile before committing to a strategy. Candidates who immediately go all-in on one lever are flagged as impulsive.
Direction (Arrows)
The Task: A ccollection of arrows flashes on the screen. Indicate the direction of the central arrow only, as quickly and accurately as possible. Sometimes, the middle arrow is surrounded by Xs. Then, you need to indicate no direction.
What It Assesses: Selective attention, focus, and the ability to filter irrelevant information, persistence.
Skill-Enablers: Focused Attention and Persistent Effort.
Based on: Eriksen Flanker Task
Pro Tip
Train your eye to lock onto the centre of the screen before each round begins. After an error, do not dwell –recover immediately. The game measures both accuracy and resilience after mistakes.
Balance
The Task: A series of drills, each showing a set of scales. Based on the information on the balanced scales, add a combination of shapes to the empty scales to keep them balanced. Drills get harder as you progress.
What It Assesses: Quick mathematical perception and calculation.
The Task: Two teams sell the same product and must independently set their price as either high or low. If both set high prices, both profit moderately. If only one defects to a low price, the defector profits more at the other’s expense. If both go low, both earn less. The same porocess repeats itself multiple rounds.
What It Assesses: Fairness, teamwork, competitive decision-making, and the balance between individual and collective gain.
Skill-Enablers: Learning Agility and Emotion Perception
Based on: Prisoner’s Dilemma
Pro Tip
Consider your desired role and think – am I expected to be more competitive and aggressive, or more of a team player?
Tickets
The Task: Sort items into two boxes using different classification rules. The rules may switch between rounds.
What It Assesses: Cognitive processing speed, rule-switching ability, and the capacity to suppress a previously learned response in favour of a new one.
Skill-Enablers: Focused Attention and Cognitive Agility
Pro Tip
Treat each box as an entirely separate mental task rather than trying to hold both rules in mind simultaneously.
Balloon
The Task: Pump 45 balloons to earn money. Each pump increases the payout but also increases the risk of the balloon bursting. Once a balloon explodes, all earnings from that balloon are lost.
You will decide when to stop pumping and bank their earnings.
What It Assesses: Risk tolerance, motivation by reward, drive, and the ability to identify probabilistic patterns.
Skill-Enablers: Cognitive Agility
Based on: Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)
Pro Tip
The first few balloons are diagnostic. Pump each conservatively and note when they burst. Once you can identify which balloons burst early (high risk) versus late (low risk), adjust your strategy accordingly – bank quickly on risky ones, pump further on durable ones. Candidates who pump every balloon identically are not demonstrating pattern recognition.
Expressions
The Task: You are shown static facial images. Identify the emotion being expressed from several given options.
What It Assesses: Allegedly, emotional intelligence, empathy, and interpersonal sensitivity.
Skill-Enabler: Emotion Perception
Pro Tip
Sorry, this is honestly a very odd game for which I have no tips other than to use your common sense and hope for the best.
Security
The Task: A wheel spins continuously on screen. You will need to time a spacebar press to align a moving marker with a specific digit on the wheel.
You must do this successfully for 20 consecutive rounds. With an error on even a single round, you go back to the starting point. You can quit at any point.
What It Assesses: Persistence, resilience, reaction time, and time management.
Skill-Enabler: Focused Attention and Persistent Effort
Pro Tip
The Security game is more of a mental challenge than a test of speed. Make a genuine effort for 5 to 10 minutes to demonstrate persistence. After that, it is acceptable and strategically correct to exit the game. Continuing indefinitely does not improve your score and might flag your behavior.
Pattern & Analysis (Likely Canceled)
Pattern and Analysis, two traditional questionnaires for inductive and numerical reasoning, are still mentioned in many online resources as a part of the Arctic Shores games collection. However, I believe that they are likely discontinued, as Arctic Shores generally favours game-based tasks over these traditional multiple-choice formats.
If you did encounter either of these during your assessment, please let me know.
Detailed behavioural strategies for role alignment
Expert insights to improve your score
A money-back guarantee policy
What Do You Get?
Description
Practice modules for core behavioural games
Guides for logical and numerical reasoning tasks
Performance feedback aligned with the Five Factor Model
Relevant Screenshot
Note: JobTestPrep’s Arctic Shores prep does not cover the Balance game, but you can get it for FREE if you purchase through my affiliate link. Details here.
Full disclosure: I’m affiliated with JobTestPrep. Using the links helps support this content and allows me to keep it ad-free.
The Skill-Enabler Model
What Are Skill-Enablers?
Arctic Shores moves beyond general personality frameworks, using its proprietary model of 7 Skill-Enablers – the underlying cognitive and behavioural traits that determine how quickly and effectively someone can acquire new skills.
According to the psychological science behind the model, skills are like leaves, and skill-enablers are like roots. While an individual’s skill are visible to all, they are actually transient and short lived. The ability to acquire new skills quickly and effectively is much more important for long-term success.
What Are the 7 Skill-Enablers Used by Arctic Shores?
The 7 Skill-Enablers are grouped into three factors. Four enablers reflect one factor only, while the other three are affected by two.
Let’s review the 7 Skill-Enablers and 3 factors:
Factor #1 – Thinking Style
Inductive Reasoning: The ability to identify patterns, understand rules, and apply knowledge in new situations. Measured most directly by the Order game, which requires you to extract logical rules from increasingly complex visual sequences.
Quantitative Reasoning: The ability to work with numerical information and analyse data accurately. Most prominent in the Balance game, which Arctic Shores itself flags as relevant primarily for roles that require a strong mathematical background..
Focused Attention: The ability to concentrate on relevant information while filtering out distractions and recovering quickly from errors. Measured across multiple games, most directly in Direction and Security.
Factor #2 – Self-Management
Cognitive Agility: The ability to learn quickly, adapt to new information, and shift between rules or strategies. Present across most games – particularly Energy, Balloon, and Tickets – wherever you need to read a changing environment and update your approach accordingly.
Persistent Effort: The tendency to maintain effort and bounce back after setbacks rather than slowing down or disengaging. Arctic Shores deliberately builds failure into games like Direction and Security to observe exactly how you respond when things go wrong matters, as much as how you perform when they go right.
Factor #3 – Interaction with Others
Learning Agility (Social): The ability to read another person’s behaviour, adapt to it, and respond in a way that reflects both awareness and judgement. Measured through the Team Sales game, where you need to interpret your counterpart’s moves and decide how to respond — cooperatively, competitively, or somewhere in between.
Emotion Perception: The ability to accurately identify emotions in others from non-verbal cues. Measured through the Expressions game, which asks you to identify emotions from AI-generated facial images.
How Do the Games Assess Skill-Enablers?
Rather than asking you to self-report on any of these traits, the games create the conditions under which each enabler naturally expresses itself: your behaviour under sustained frustration reveals Persistent Effort, your strategy in an unfamiliar game reveals Cognitive Agility, your choices in a social dilemma reveal Learning Agility and Emotion Perception together.
Which Game Measures Which Enabler?
Arctic Shores does not publish a mapping of games to Skill-Enablers, and deliberately so. Most games are designed to assess more than one enabler simultaneously, reflecting the view that cognitive ability and personality cannot meaningfully be separated.
As such, The relationships between games and enablers presented below are not official.
Inductive Reasoning: Measured most directly by the Order game, which requires you to extract logical rules from increasingly complex visual sequences.
Quantitative Reasoning: Most prominent in the Balance game, which Arctic Shores itself flags as relevant primarily for roles that require a strong mathematical background..
Focused Attention: Measured across multiple games, most directly in Direction and Security.
Cognitive Agility: Present across most games – particularly Energy, Balloon, and Tickets – wherever you need to read a changing environment and update your approach accordingly.
Persistent Effort: Arctic Shores deliberately builds failure into games like Direction and Security to observe exactly how you respond when things go wrong matters, as much as how you perform when they go right.
Learning Agility (Social): Measured through the Team game, where you need to interpret your counterpart’s moves and decide how to respond — cooperatively, competitively, or somewhere in between.
Emotion Perception: Measured directly through Expressions, and vicariously through Team.
What Skill-Enablers Are Important for My Role?
The best answer to this question is, naturally, the enablers your prospective employer chooses to assess. As I mentioned, Arctic Shores is not a single assessment, and each employer chooses the exact composition of tests.
However, revealing the relevant skill-enablers on the test itself is naturally too late. So, to have an idea of those enablers in advance, the best place to look is in your job ad.
Arctic Shores encourages employers to candidly reveal the skills they are looking for in their job ads, focusing on soft skills and expected behaviors rather than hard skills and past experience. Not only that, but employers can choose what weight they wish to give each of Arctic Shores’ skill enablers in the final score, and even eliminate some of them entirely.
Therefore, analyzing your job ad for the desired candidate’s soft skills and behaviors is a very good hint as to what your employer expects to see during your test.
Preparation
I am affiliated with JobTestPrep because I believe that they provide the best Arctic Shores prep available online today. Below we will give you all the reasons why. All screenshots are taken from the preparation pack.
Tailored and Interactive
JobTestPrep’s Arctic Shores practice tests are interactive, game-based mock tests, allowing you the full experience in advance.
A Solid Scoring Model
In the age of AI, anyone can code a simple mini-game and call it practice. JobTestPrep’s prep course certainly isn’t the cheapest, but their team of vocational psychologists makes sure that their practice tests align with the Arctic Shores assessment not only in form, but also in substance.
Moreover, being the biggest, oldest player in the corporate prep market provides JobTestPrep a database of thousands of candidates, allowing them to constantly update and perfect what’s behind the scenes.
Interactive Guides
JobTestPrep doens’t just throw a bunch of games at you. On top of the interactive mock tests, JobTestPrep’s Arctic Shores prep also offers interactive study guides for each test, guiding you how to actually solve them.
