We all want to learn things every day, it is how we become more intelligent and it lets us take on increasingly complicated challenges. For the most part, board games are fun leisure activities; normally pretty easy on your brain and there is no reason why they should not be. In the same way, there is no reason that we can’t enjoy educational board games provided they are done in a fun engaging way. The idea is that hopefully every game on this list will teach you something or improve your cognitive skills.
Table of Contents
- Educational Board Games About Science
- Educational Board Games About Geography
- Educational Board Games That Work Your Brain
- Educational Board Games With Word Play
- What Have We Learnt About Educational Board Games?
Educational Board Games About Science
The following board games are aimed at helping you understand scientific concepts and ideas.
Evolution: Climate
Evolution: Climate is a game all about how animals adapt and evolve in the harshest of climates around the world. It is a game focused on biology and, as the name suggests, more specifically, evolutionally biology. Aimed at 12+ it is a great introduction to this area of science and ideas and themes should stick.
The aim of the game is to eat the most possible food on the board to ensure that your species has the most possible population when the game ends. Players play cards in the from the deck that can give you various special traits, for example, the trait Heavy Fur prevents 4 population loss due to extreme cold.
The game throws in various climate related challenges like heat waves, cold snaps. and volcanic eruptions. Players can see how that affects the plant life that they were feeding on adding further challenges to your species survival.
Evolution: Climates comes as part of a hugely successful series and brings new and interesting ideas into the mix. It is educational, engaging, and memorable – so something will stick with you in those science classes!
Cytosis: A Cell Biology Board Game
Cytosis is a worker management game that takes place within a cell. These workers can gather resources for the cells like mRNA and carbohydrates. Players then convert these into useful material. As we all know, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and it too features heavily in the game fulfilling its role of ATP production.
These resources gathered are used to build enzymes and protein hormones just like a real cell would. These, in turn, increase your health points and ultimately the player with the most health points wins.
The most helpful thing about this educational game is that without any real knowledge of biology you can pick up the game. The rules are super clear and straightforward and after the play through you could probably give a pretty good account of the biological process.
Educational Board Games About Geography
These educational board games are all about the earth: locations, landmarks, and the animals that inhabit it.
Fauna – The Animal Guessing Game
Fauna is a game all about understanding the animals that live on our planet. In every round you draw an animal card with it picture. Players must then guess the following about the animal:
- Weight
- Height
- Tail Length (if it has one)
- Where on Earth the animal lives – this is the most important and gives the most points
The animal cards on this game give both the common and scientific names of the animals. It is a great game to understand more about both the animals and geography. Players will start to see patterns of animals native to Africa, Asia, Europe, and more – there are over 300 animals in the game so plenty to choose from and plenty to learn.
The most appealing thing about this game is that it is educational for both children and adults. The premise is simple, but quickly you will learn and identify the animals from memory. It is a great game all round.
Trekking the World
Trekking the World has a globetrotting theme that many among us enjoy – who doesn’t want to travel the world? The game uses 48 real-world locations and was designed with both avid board gamers and casual players alike.
The premise of the game is reasonably straight forward: players are adventuring round the world from airport to airport. Certain locations are “Must See” depending on where they landed during the shuffle. If players visited these, let’s say the Pyramids of Giza, for example, they would get additional bonus points.
It is a real who’s who (or where’s where?) of famous locations: Old Havana, Christ the Redeemer, Machu Pichu and more. There are additional objectives to get most figurines, clothing, crafts, and postcards. These give bonus points and mix the game up a little rather than just travelling landmark to landmark.
Again, this is an educational game that focuses on geography, but in a slightly different way by throwing landmarks into the mix.
Educational Board Games That Work Your Brain
These educational games are aimed at exercising your memory and pattern recognition.
Cortex Challenge
Braintopia is a game that is focused at testing cognition, sensory perception, and memory. Really, it is all about recognising patterns, solving puzzles and memorizing sequences of images. It is a nice break from the typical educational type quiz games, like trivial pursuit or movie quizzes.
The game is actually played as a series of mini games and this way makes it feel more like a party game than an educational chore. An example of a game could be a maze challenge, where you must choose the right path from three options, or finding a missing puzzle piece.
It markets itself as a brain game and there are surely some mental gymnastics involved, but it is nowhere near as tough or nerdy as you might think when presented with the box. It manages to make these puzzles fun and engaging.
Cabo
Ok, so Cabo is technically a card game and actually based on the game Cambio. However, we though it helpful to add because it incorporates the memory functions that work your brain. Cabo takes the Cambio formula and adds its own dedicated deck of cards, with the cards telling you what to do like “Peek”, “Swap”, or “Spy”.
You start with four cards faced down and may only look at two of them. While remembering these cards you pick new cards from the deck and replace them with your face down cards, in the process activating their abilities. It is one of the best memory card games out there. We recommend you check out our How To Play Cambio guide if you want more info.
Educational Board Games With Word Play
Board games all about words, anagrams, and making the best out of your vocabulary!
Bananagrams
Bananagrams is a well-known educational tile game and plays quite similarly to scrabble. It is all about creating words using the tiles in front of you. When you finish a word you shout “peel” and everyone must then pick up another tile. Play continues like this until all the tiles are gone and then the first player to finish wins.
It is a really straightforward game, but it comes in a small portable banana – it is really easy to transport and you can play it pretty much anywhere. Also, due to its small size and relatively few parts the game comes out pretty cheap – at around $15 dollars, so it is worth a look at for sure.
Honorable Mention: Boggle
Boggle is a truly classic educational board game and throws us back to the 1970s. There was certainly a core market for educational games back then, some hugely successful, others not so much. Boggle is one of these games that have somewhat stood the test of time. It is kind of a household name (in my house at least) and shares many of the mental benefits that scrabble does.
For those that do not know, Boggle is essentially an anagram solving game. Players mix up the grid and then have three minutes to create as many words as possible with more points for bigger words.
The game uses the parts of the brain linked to working memory and visual perception, which many games do not do and the anagram solving element of Boggle is especially useful in the educational development of children. If from an early age children start to solve anagrams they are able to recognise patterns in other media quicker; not to mention the improvements in vocabulary too.
What Have We Learnt About Educational Board Games?
Educational board games do not need to be boring. They can be engaging, fun, and most importantly teach you something new. Some of the games are aimed at teaching you specific things, such as Trekking the World and Geography. Others attempt to improve your cognitive thinking and reasoning, like Braintopia. Some games focus more on the educational aspect than others – Evolution: Climate is more of a board game than an educational tool, but there is no reason to not try and learn something from each of the games on this list.
