The hidden benefits of board games
Analog games can help promote children’s learning and development
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The oldest playable board game, the Royal Game of Ur from ancient Mesopotamia, dates back to roughly 4,600 years ago. Millennia later, even in our digital world, board games are as popular as ever. The face-to-face socialization, tactile components, and tangible immersion offer players an experience that screens fail to match.
As a child, I played classics like Monopoly, Scattergories, and The Game of Life for hours with family and friends. Now, as a parent, I look forward to introducing my 4-year-old daughter to those games and many more. When she was 2, we started with simple memory and matching games, but as she’s grown, so has the size and complexity of her collection.
A growing science of board games
It turns out there’s more to board games than pure entertainment: they have measurable benefits for children’s learning and development. Board games allow active, playful learning in domains such as math, science, and language, while also fostering social and emotional skills.
“Actually, digital games were the first types of games being studied for learning purposes, but in recent years, research has increasingly focused on board games for children’s education,” says Carla Sousa, a psychologist and researcher at the Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies at Lusófona University in Portugal. “So, it is now an emerging field of interest.”
Sousa is a long-time board game aficionado herself. She researches the potential of game-based learning in promoting inclusive, effective, and transformative educational practices. Games are structured, interactive experiences with pre-defined rules, roles, tasks, and constraints. As opposed to more open-ended play, which is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated, games include specific goals or objectives that provide players with direction, purpose, and motivation.
Board games are a type of analog game, along with cards, dice, and tabletop role-playing games. Analog games use physical components and usually provide tangible, social, and cognitive interactions in the real world, unlike most digital games.
“Board games allow active, playful learning in domains such as math, science, and language, while also fostering social and emotional skills.”
Learning through board games
“The main pillar for the benefits of analog gaming is that, for you to actually play a game, you need to understand how the game system works — which is different from most technologies young people interact with these days,” says Sousa. “Even if you don’t know how to play a smartphone game or use TikTok, you start tapping your screen, and things will automatically happen.”
Sousa has identified analog games as a powerful educational tool that may enhance learning through interactive, immersive experiences. In a 2023 systematic review, Sousa and her colleagues examined 45 studies that looked at the potential of analog games for learning purposes with a total of 3,550 participants, consisting mostly of students in elementary school, secondary school, and higher education. More than 70 percent of the studies adopted games that were specifically created for research purposes, while the rest used commercially available games.
Most studies identified analog games as an effective pedagogical approach, from testing participants right after the game or within weeks of an intervention period. They yielded positive cognitive outcomes like improved memory and problem-solving, as well as psychological benefits on creativity, self-confidence, and wellbeing. Games can also foster key aspects of meaningful learning, including engagement, satisfaction, and freedom of experimentation. Notably, analog games appear to promote essential soft skills, particularly communication and collaboration.
Board games in the classroom
Jorge Moya-Higueras, Professor of Psychology at the University of Lleida in Spain, has run several intervention studies in primary schools, based on board games. He has uncovered a range of cognitive, social, and emotional benefits in both neurotypical and neurodiverse student populations.
A 2024 study by Moya-Higueras and his colleagues included 121 children aged 8 to 9, from rural and urban primary schools. In 15 half-hour sessions over the course of eight weeks, during school time, a group of the children played memory board games, such as Alles Tomate!, Spooky Stairs, and Chicken Cha Cha Cha. A second group played board games designed to boost mathematical skills, such as Numenko-in-a-Bag, Pig 10, and Shut the Box. A control group of children attended regular classes as usual.
“We used board games that have been published during the last thirty years, more or less, and all of these games are commercial games,” says Moya-Higueras. “You can find them in every supermarket and mall.”
Students’ memory and math skills were assessed before and after the intervention. Surprisingly, the children who played math games as opposed to the memory games made the biggest gains in visuospatial short-term memory and working memory updating – the process of replacing outdated information with new content – compared to the control group. These students also improved most in two of the four tested math skills: number operations and ranking. Meanwhile, students who played memory games improved their visuospatial working memory updating relative to the control group.
The results suggest that integrating board games into the classroom could offer teachers a cost-effective, engaging way to promote students’ math learning and cognitive development. “We wanted to test if teachers using board games in the classroom could improve students’ cognitive processes — and that is what we have found,” he said. “Every school that adopted board games for our studies has continued to use them, long after the research ended.”
“Integrating board games into the classroom could offer teachers a cost-effective, engaging way to promote students’ math learning and cognitive development.”
Outside the classroom, both researchers have turned analog games into a cherished family pastime. Sousa plays the fast-paced Ghost Blitz with her 5-year-old son, while Moya-Higueras’s son already strategizes in Catan at age 8. I’m eager to build a similar tradition with my daughter – one that nurtures her growing mind, strengthens family bonds, and keeps the spirit of play alive, all at once.
Moya-Higueras and Sousa recommend the following board games to play with children at home or in school:
- Bee Alert (ages 4+): A matching game that tests memory.
- My First Carcassonne (ages 4+): A twist on a classic tile game.
- Dobble/Spot it! (ages 6+): A simple pattern recognition game.
- Happy Salmon (ages 6+): An ultra-fast, very silly card game.
- Catan Junior (ages 6+): Classic game redesigned for families and a younger audience.
- Pig 10 (ages 6+): An educational card game that involves number skills.
- Blurble (ages 6+): A fast-paced word game.
- Sherlock Express (ages 7+): Focused on pattern recognition and real-time game play.
- Ghost Blitz (ages 8+): A lightning fast shape and color recognition game.
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