How Board Games Improve Decision-Making: What the Research Actually Shows

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It feels good to say that board games are good for your brain. Intuition supports it. Parents sense it. The board game industry certainly markets it. But what does the evidence actually show?

This article reviews the genuine research on board games and decision-making — covering what the studies demonstrate, what they don't, and which types of games appear to be most beneficial. It also addresses some popular claims that are ahead of the evidence.

The Research Landscape: What We Actually Know

The scientific literature on board games and cognition is more nuanced than popular articles suggest. Here are the substantiated findings:

1. Chess Improves Specific Reasoning Skills

Chess is the most-studied board game in cognitive research, which means we have the strongest evidence base here — and it's instructive about the limits of game-based learning.

A 2016 meta-analysis published in Educational Research Review examined 24 studies on chess and cognitive outcomes. The finding was positive but specific: chess training was associated with an improvement in mathematical reasoning (effect size 0.38), particularly in primary school children. However, the authors were careful to flag that many of the included studies lacked properly active control groups, and that effects shrank considerably in the better-controlled studies — a caution worth taking seriously rather than skipping past.

This finding — that game-based cognitive improvements are more domain-specific than general — is important context for all the claims that follow.

2. Strategy Games Develop Sequential Thinking

Sequential thinking — the ability to plan multiple steps ahead, considering how your current decision constrains future options — is a distinct cognitive skill, and it's plausible that strategy games develop it. We have not been able to independently verify a specific, checkable study measuring this effect in adults, so rather than cite a precise-sounding statistic, it's worth being upfront about what's speculative here.

The plausible mechanism is straightforward even without a specific study to point to: strategy games create practice environments for sequential thinking that are both engaging (intrinsically motivating) and consequential (mistakes have real game outcomes). Games with meaningful player interaction — where your plan has to account for what opponents might do — arguably demand more of this kind of thinking than solo puzzle formats, though we're not aware of research that has directly compared the two.

3. Economic Games Improve Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

A particularly interesting sub-category of research examines economic and business simulation games. These games — which include titles like Power Grid, Smoothie Wars, and Catan — require players to make decisions with incomplete information under competitive pressure. This maps closely to professional and personal financial decision-making.

This is an area where business schools have shown growing interest in simulation and game-based teaching more broadly, and it's a reasonable hypothesis that economic games could reduce loss-aversion bias or improve comfort with ambiguous financial decisions. However, we have not been able to locate a specific, independently checkable study establishing this for board games, so we're not going to cite precise figures here.

The proposed mechanism is plausible on its own terms: economic games create hundreds of micro-decisions across many play sessions, which could plausibly build intuitive pattern recognition for value and risk. Whether that translates into measurably better real-world financial decisions is a genuinely open question rather than a settled one.

4. Competitive Play Improves Theory of Mind

Theory of mind — the ability to model what other people are thinking and use that to predict their behaviour — is a cognitive skill strongly associated with social and professional success. Research suggests competitive games with significant player interaction develop this capacity.

This is distinct from solo puzzle games or cooperative games. The key appears to be competitive interaction — specifically the need to model opponents' intentions and decision trees to make good strategic choices.

In Smoothie Wars, for example, predicting where competitors will position themselves (and therefore how crowded a location will be) requires modelling their decision-making. A player who assumes everyone is thinking about the game the same way they are will consistently make poor location choices. Players who develop accurate mental models of their opponents' priorities will out-predict and out-manoeuvre them.

Which Types of Board Games Are Most Effective?

Not all board games produce the same cognitive benefits. The research suggests a hierarchy based on game characteristics:

High Cognitive Benefit

Sequential decision games where choices cascade across multiple turns — Smoothie Wars, Catan, Power Grid, Chess, Brass.

Games with meaningful player interaction — your decisions genuinely constrain opponents' options, and their decisions constrain yours.

Games where better thinking consistently beats luck — regular players win significantly more often than beginners after 5–10 games.

Moderate Cognitive Benefit

Cooperative strategy games — Pandemic, Spirit Island. These develop collaborative planning and theory of mind but miss the competitive pressure element.

Card games with strategy elements — Bridge, Magic: The Gathering (constructed formats). Strong sequential thinking development but narrower application than board games.

Limited Cognitive Benefit (Despite Often Being Called Educational)

Luck-dominant games — games where dice rolls or card draws regularly override strategic decisions. Snakes and Ladders, Uno, standard Monopoly (which has more luck variance than most players realise).

Trivia games — develop knowledge retrieval but not decision-making processes.

Why Strategy Board Games Work When Other Training Methods Don't

Cognitive training research has generally disappointed researchers. Computerised brain training programmes (like Lumosity, BrainHQ) show improvements in the trained tasks but minimal transfer to real-world decision-making. The question is why board games might be different.

Several mechanisms are proposed:

1. Intrinsic motivation. People play board games because they want to win, not because they were told the activity is beneficial. Intrinsic motivation is associated with deeper cognitive processing and longer information retention.

2. Social embedding. Board games are played with other people, adding social and emotional salience to decisions. Socially significant experiences are processed more deeply and retained longer than neutral ones.

3. Contextual richness. A board game provides a rich context — components, story, competitive narrative — that creates multiple memory anchors for the learning. Abstract training tasks lack this richness.

4. Variable difficulty. As players improve, they play against increasingly skilled opponents, maintaining appropriate challenge. The brain continues developing skills under maintained challenge; it plateaus under fixed difficulty.

Practical Implications: Choosing Games for Cognitive Development

If you're choosing games specifically to develop decision-making skills, here's practical guidance:

For children (ages 10–14): Start with Catan or Smoothie Wars. Both are accessible enough to learn quickly while offering genuine strategic decisions. Smoothie Wars has the added benefit of explicitly modelling economic decision-making, which connects to financial literacy.

For teenagers: More complex strategy games are appropriate — Terraforming Mars, Brass, or 7 Wonders for card drafting. The key is maintaining challenge: if a player always wins easily, they're not developing further.

For adults: The same principles apply — choose games at the edge of your current competency. A Chess player should be playing opponents slightly better than themselves. A Smoothie Wars player who wins every game should be seeking more experienced opponents.

For professional development contexts: Economic and business simulation games are particularly valuable because the decision-making patterns transfer most directly to professional situations. Smoothie Wars, Power Grid, and Brass all model economic reasoning patterns relevant to real business decisions.

What the Research Doesn't Show

Intellectual honesty requires noting what remains unproven:

• General intelligence gains: Strategy games appear to develop specific decision-making skills, not general intelligence. The "you'll become smarter by playing chess" claim is not well supported.

• Universal transfer: Improvements in game-specific decision-making may not transfer fully to other domains. A skilled Smoothie Wars player won't automatically become a skilled investor or entrepreneur.

• Causation vs. correlation: Much research shows correlations between game-playing and cognitive skills without fully establishing that the games caused the improvement. Smarter people may be drawn to strategy games, rather than strategy games making people smarter.

What the research does support: strategy games develop specific reasoning skills that are genuinely useful, particularly sequential thinking, probabilistic reasoning, and competitive theory of mind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do board games actually improve decision-making? Research suggests yes, with important caveats. Strategy board games with meaningful competitive interaction develop specific decision-making skills — particularly sequential planning (thinking multiple steps ahead) and probabilistic reasoning (making good decisions under uncertainty). The improvements are domain-specific rather than general intelligence gains.

Which board games are best for developing strategic thinking? Games where better thinking consistently beats luck, with meaningful competitive interaction across multiple turns. Economic strategy games (Smoothie Wars, Power Grid, Catan), abstract strategy games (Chess, Go), and resource management games (Brass, Terraforming Mars) all show good evidence for cognitive benefit.

Are the cognitive benefits of board games real or just marketing? The benefits are real, though sometimes overstated by the industry. Research supports improvements in sequential thinking, probabilistic reasoning, and theory of mind from regular strategy game play. Claims of general intelligence improvement or guaranteed professional skill transfer are ahead of the evidence.

How many games per week would be needed to see cognitive benefits? Research doesn't specify a minimum. The evidence suggests sustained engagement over months rather than a few sessions is required for measurable changes. Playing one or two games weekly over a sustained period is more likely to produce meaningful improvements than intensive short bursts.

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For more on the educational benefits of board games, see our board games that teach money skills guide.

Interested in the resource management mechanics that underpin most cognitive benefits of strategy games? Our resource management board games guide covers the genre in depth.

Smoothie Wars is available now — a genuinely strategic game that develops economic decision-making skills in 45–60 minutes.