Board games have made a remarkable comeback in recent years. I have noticed game shops and board game cafés popping up in my own area. They have also appeared increasingly often in educational research, particularly in studies exploring ways to support executive functions in primary school.

That is hardly surprising. Good board games are affordable, require no screens, encourage interaction, and often call upon exactly the skills we value in education: planning, collaborating, waiting your turn, coping with winning and losing, and adapting when circumstances change. But do they actually offer added value in the classroom? Can board games be more than just a fun break between lessons?

A new study by Elena Cravet and Maria Carmen Usai, published in Learning and Instruction , attempts to answer that question. The researchers followed 150 fourth- and fifth-grade students in an Italian primary school. For ten weeks, four classes participated in a one-hour program centered on board games twice a week. This went beyond simply playing. Each session began with a short story about a specific skill, followed by a guided discussion, a board game, and a joint reflection afterward. The entire program was therefore explicitly structured around metacognition: thinking about what you do and why you do it.

The researchers looked at various possible effects. Not only on executive functions such as inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, but also on social-emotional skills and academic performance. Many studies on executive functions remain limited to cognitive tests. Here, the researchers also examined how students function in daily school practice.

The first finding may not be what some proponents of learning through play have hoped for. On the computer tasks measuring executive functions, the researchers found no clear effects. Students who followed the program did not score significantly better than the control group afterward. This does not necessarily mean that nothing happened. It does mean, however, that the study provides no strong evidence that this intervention substantially strengthened such underlying cognitive functions.

But at the same time, the researchers observed something else. Teachers reported improvements in students’ daily functioning. In particular, behavioral regulation and cognitive regulation evolved more favorably in the intervention group. Additionally, the researchers found an improvement in emotional resilience. Students appeared to cope better with setbacks and emotions.

They also observed an interesting pattern in the school results. The students who participated in the program did not improve spectacularly, but remained relatively stable, whereas the control group actually declined. The authors therefore do not speak of a learning gain, but of a possible protective effect. In other words: the intervention does not necessarily seem to propel students forward, but may help them to decline less. Also, in education, we are often looking for interventions that yield spectacular improvements. In practice, however, it often involves something more modest but not necessarily less valuable. And preventing things from deteriorating can certainly be that. Precisely for students who experience extra challenges, as in this study, this can be a meaningful result.

At the same time, caution is warranted. This was not a large-scale randomised study, as all students came from the same school, and the classes were not assigned randomly. Moreover, differences between the groups already existed at the start. The researchers statistically corrected for this, but that remains less robust than true randomization. The sample size is also relatively limited. Although 150 students is not exceptionally small for a school study, it ultimately involves only nine classes in one school. Replications in other schools and contexts are therefore necessary.

However, caution does not mean we should dismiss the research out of hand. The study makes an interesting contribution to a growing body of literature suggesting that board games can be more than just entertainment. Not because they suddenly make children smarter or directly train executive functions, the entire literature on transfer has taught us for over 100 years how difficult that is to achieve . But rather because they create a rich context in which students continuously practice self-regulation, social interaction, and dealing with challenges. The value of board games in education may lie less in training individual cognitive skills and more in creating situations where children must spontaneously apply those skills.

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