“Board games make kids smarter” is one of those claims everyone seems to believe and few people check. At Xpidemix we run board game programmes for schools, so we have a stake in the answer, and that’s exactly why we wanted to get it right. We went through the peer-reviewed research to see what board games actually do for children’s learning, and where the evidence runs out.
The short version: the evidence is genuinely encouraging, but it’s specific. The right games, played the right way, build particular skills. Vague promises of “boosting brain power” don’t hold up, and we think schools deserve to know the difference.
The evidence at a glance
| Claim | Strength of evidence | What the research shows |
|---|---|---|
| Number board games improve early maths | Strong | Repeated randomised studies and a 2025 meta-analysis show a positive effect for preschool to Primary 2. |
| Modern board games in class improve executive functions | Promising | A 522-pupil randomised trial in primary schools found gains in working memory, plus reading and maths fluency. |
| Games build motivation, engagement and social interaction | Moderate | A systematic review reports consistent benefits, though many studies were small. |
| Cooperative games make children more prosocial | Mixed | One study found more sharing after cooperative play; a follow-up did not replicate it. |
| Strategy games like chess raise general intelligence or exam scores | Weak | Large trials and meta-analyses find little or no transfer to school attainment. |
1. Early maths: the strongest evidence
The best-known work comes from psychologists Robert Siegler and Geetha Ramani. Their idea was simple: a board game where the squares are numbered 1 to 10 in a straight line gives children a physical picture of the number line. Every time a child moves a token and says “six, seven”, they’re practising how numbers relate to each other in size.
In their 2008 study, low-income preschoolers played a numbered linear board game for just four 15-minute sessions over two weeks. A control group played the same game with coloured squares instead of numbers. The number-game children made large gains in understanding numerical magnitude, and caught up with middle-income peers on several measures. The colour-game group didn’t change (Siegler & Ramani, 2008). Related work found the game also improved counting, numeral identification and magnitude comparison, with gains lasting at least nine weeks.
Crucially for schools, this isn’t just a lab effect. A follow-up study moved the game into real preschool classrooms, run in small groups by classroom assistants after about an hour of training. Children still improved across four numeracy measures, and stayed engaged for over 90% of the session time (Ramani, Siegler & Hitti, 2012).
A 2025 meta-analysis pulling together 18 studies from preschool to second grade confirmed a statistically significant positive effect of linear number board games on children’s maths outcomes (Nelson et al., 2025). The average effect is modest rather than dramatic, and it depends on factors like dosage, who plays alongside the child, and how the board is designed. That’s a useful finding in itself: how a game is run matters as much as which game it is.
2. Executive functions: promising new evidence from real classrooms
Executive functions are the mental control skills behind learning: holding information in mind (working memory, or “updating”), stopping an impulse (inhibition), and switching between rules (flexibility). Modern board games lean on these constantly. Think of a fast reaction game where you must grab the right object and ignore the tempting wrong one, or a memory game where the information keeps changing.
The most relevant study for schools is a 2024 cluster randomised controlled trial in Spain with 522 primary pupils across five schools, from Primary 1 to Primary 6. Classes were randomly assigned either to play modern board games in class, in small groups of three to five, for 12 one-hour sessions over six weeks, or to continue regular lessons. Regular teachers ran the sessions.
Compared with regular classes, the board game group improved more in working memory (updating). In Primary 2 to 6, they also improved more in reading fluency, maths fluency and calculation (Vita-Barrull et al., 2024). The authors concluded that playing modern board games in class could support learning and cognitive development better than direct instruction alone.
It’s one trial, and the authors are upfront about its limits: they couldn’t control for children’s gaming at home, and some teachers new to games found the sessions stressful at first. But it’s a well-designed study in real schools, with a programme length similar to what a school could actually run.
An earlier randomised trial by the same research group, with 7- to 12-year-olds at risk of social exclusion, found improvements in flexibility, inhibition and sustained attention after nine weeks of play. Interestingly, children playing social and verbal games such as Dixit improved too, not just those on games designed around executive functions (Moya-Higueras et al., 2023). That suggests a broad range of thoughtfully chosen games can exercise these skills.
3. Engagement, motivation and social skills
A 2019 systematic review of 27 board game intervention studies found positive effects across a wide range of outcomes, from learning content knowledge to improved motivation and interpersonal interaction. It also noted board games may be especially useful for children who struggle with language-heavy approaches (Noda, Shirotsuki & Nakao, 2019).
The same review is honest about the weaknesses: many studies were small or lacked a proper comparison group. So we treat this as supportive evidence rather than proof.
Cooperative games are a good example of why careful claims matter. One experiment found 4- and 5-year-olds shared more with others after playing a cooperative game than a competitive one (Toppe, Hardecker & Haun, 2019). But a larger follow-up by the same team didn’t find the effect, possibly because its game required less real coordination between players (Toppe et al., 2021). The lesson for us: cooperation has to be built into the game, not just its label.
4. Where the evidence runs out: “games make you smarter”
Chess is the classic example of a game claimed to raise intelligence. A large randomised trial in England with more than 4,000 children found no evidence that chess instruction improved maths, reading or science scores (Jerrim et al., 2018). A review of meta-analyses on chess, music and working memory training concluded that “far transfer”, where a skill improves something unrelated, is rare, and that the small effects reported in some studies shrink to almost nothing in better-designed research (Sala & Gobet, 2017).
That doesn’t make chess a bad activity. It means the benefit of a game is mostly in what it directly practises. A game that rehearses number relationships builds number sense; a game that demands quick inhibition exercises inhibition. Expecting any game to lift general intelligence or exam results on its own is overselling it.
What this means for schools
Taken together, the research points to a few clear design principles for any board game programme:
- Choose games for the skill you want. Gains appear where the game directly exercises a skill, such as number sense, working memory or inhibition. Pick games deliberately, not just for fun.
- Give it enough sessions. The effective programmes ran several sessions over weeks, not a single fun day. Around a dozen hour-long sessions is a realistic, research-backed starting point.
- Play in small, facilitated groups. Groups of three to five with an adult guiding play worked well in classroom trials, and facilitators adjusting their support to each child made a difference.
- Support the teachers. Teachers new to games can find the sessions stressful at first. Training and a structured session plan help.
- Measure honestly. If a school wants to know whether a programme works, it should check specific skills before and after, ideally against a comparison class.
These principles also line up well with MOE’s 21st Century Competencies. Social-emotional competencies like self-management, social awareness and responsible decision-making, and emerging competencies such as critical and adaptive thinking and collaboration, are practised naturally at a well-run game table: waiting your turn, managing a loss, negotiating, planning ahead and adapting when the plan fails.
How we use this at Xpidemix
We build our school programmes around this evidence: games chosen for specific skills, a structured multi-week series rather than one-off sessions, small facilitated groups, and a debrief after play so children put into words what they did and why. We’d rather promise what the research supports and deliver it well than overclaim.
If you’re a school leader or teacher interested in a board game programme, get in touch with us. We’re happy to talk through the research and what a programme could look like for your pupils.
References
- Jerrim, J., Macmillan, L., Micklewright, J., Sawtell, M., & Wiggins, M. (2018). Does teaching children how to play cognitively demanding games improve their educational attainment? Evidence from a randomized controlled trial of chess instruction in England. Journal of Human Resources, 53(4), 993–1021. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.53.4.0516.7952R
- Ministry of Education, Singapore. 21st Century Competencies. https://www.moe.gov.sg/education-in-sg/21st-century-competencies
- Moya-Higueras, J., Solé-Puiggené, M., Vita-Barrull, N., Estrada-Plana, V., Guzmán, N., Arias, S., Garcia, X., Ayesa-Arriola, R., & March-Llanes, J. (2023). Just play cognitive modern board and card games, it’s going to be good for your executive functions: A randomized controlled trial with children at risk of social exclusion. Children, 10(9), 1492. https://doi.org/10.3390/children10091492
- Nelson, G., Boedeker, P., Devlin, B. L., Lesner, T., Drake, K. R., Sutherland, M., Wilke, E. J., Cook, M., & Schmitt, S. A. (2025). Investigating main effects and moderators of linear number board games: A meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543251383552
- Noda, S., Shirotsuki, K., & Nakao, M. (2019). The effectiveness of intervention with board games: A systematic review. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 13, 22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-019-0164-1
- Ramani, G. B., Siegler, R. S., & Hitti, A. (2012). Taking it to the classroom: Number board games as a small group learning activity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(3), 661–672. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028995
- Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515–520. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760
- Siegler, R. S., & Ramani, G. B. (2008). Playing linear numerical board games promotes low-income children’s numerical development. Developmental Science, 11(5), 655–661. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00714.x
- Toppe, T., Hardecker, S., & Haun, D. B. M. (2019). Playing a cooperative game promotes preschoolers’ sharing with third-parties, but not social inclusion. PLoS ONE, 14(8), e0221092. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221092
- Toppe, T., Hardecker, S., Zerres, F., & Haun, D. B. M. (2021). The influence of cooperation and competition on preschoolers’ prosociality toward in-group and out-group members. Royal Society Open Science, 8, 202171. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202171
- Vita-Barrull, N., Estrada-Plana, V., March-Llanes, J., Sotoca-Orgaz, P., Guzmán, N., Ayesa, R., & Moya-Higueras, J. (2024). Do you play in class? Board games to promote cognitive and educational development in primary school: A cluster randomized controlled trial. Learning and Instruction, 93, 101946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.101946
