We’ve all experienced dull dry learning experiences but it doesn’t have to be that way, nor is it the best way to learn. Learning through more interactive activities will greatly improve students retention and interest in the subject matter.

Average retention rate of learning by lecture is 5% while that of practice by doing (Activity-oriented) is about 75%.

The Impact of Hands-On-Approach on Student Academic Performance in Basic Science and Mathematics https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1086006.pdf

Tools like Baamboozle or Kahoot! are a great for teaching however it still has students in front of a screen. Board games are a great way to give students a fun structured way to learn that is more interactive then most mediums. They get to physically touch and move components right in front of them while also interacting with their peers. I’ve even gained an interest about learning a topic just because I first experienced it in a board game. Find your subject and check out the some great educational and fun board games.

While reading through the list pay attention to the number of players, time to play, and difficulty of the game to determine what is right for your classroom.

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Agriculture

Educational Value

Viticulture is a worker placement game about making wine. Players manage their vineyard by planting vines, growing grapes, harvesting, crushing the grapes & aging grapes and wine. The vines have actual names for the types of grapes they make. There is also requirements for making different kinds of wines. This game can give a great overview of all the things that could go into owning and managing a vineyard or farm all in the fun of a game.

Arts

Educational Value

Canvas is all about creating breathtaking pieces of art. Players draft clear cards with a piece of art on them. Then the separate art cards are layered on top of each other to create a final masterpiece. The game focuses on how different pieces of art can compliment each other scoring different points for the end of the game.

Astrology

Educational Value

Players take on the roles of astrologers trying to be the first to discover Planet X. Through examining the sky players use a “Clue-like” deduction method to pin-point its location. Of course as astrologers we also went to help further the betterment of science by sharing information with others about our discovers, but be careful sharing too much or too little could cost you.

*This game does require at least one phone to play. Players main focus is still on the game board not so much on the phone. The phone is to help drive the randomness/variety of the puzzle while providing clues to the players throughout the game.

Biology

Educational Value

Players are placed directly into a plant cell. They will be competing with the limited resources to perform photosynthesis, produce carbohydrates, and build the cell wall. Players must use proteins, hormones, and cell component cards to achieve their goals.

Educational Value

Players are going inside the human cell. In this game there are resources like mRNA, & ATP. Players use those resources to build enzymes, hormones, and receptors.

Educational Value

Gregor Mendel is the 19th Century Augustinian Friar credited with the discovery of modern genetics. In Genotype, you play as his assistants, competing to collect experimental data on pea plants by trying to control how the plants inherit key Traits from their parents: seed shape, flower color, stem color, and plant height. The observable Traits of a Pea Plant (its Phenotype) are determined by its genetic makeup (its Genotype). The relationship between Genotype and Phenotype and the nature of genetic inheritance are at the heart of Genotype: A Mendelian Genetics Game. – Description from Designer

Educational Value

Peptide is an open-drafting card game with resource management elements. Basically, players compete to link amino acids side-by-side, forming what’s called a Peptide Chain (in biology, this process is called RNA Translation). In order to do so, players must first select from a number of available open-drafted face up cards, which in the game represent cellular organelles. Each organelle rewards players with either molecular resources or cellular actions. – Description from BGG

Botany

Educational Value

In this game players are nurturing nature. Players are learning to take care of plants in their homes balancing the right amounts of water, sunlight, and plant food. There are 42 different houseplants to take care of.

Students can easily take aspects of what they learn playing this game into their own green thumbed lifestyle.

Educational Value

Undergrove is all about the relationship between mushrooms and trees. The fungi gives nutrients to your seedlings helping them grow into strong trees. The main resources in this game are carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. This game was designed by the famed Elizabeth Hargrave who also designed the hit game Wingspan.

Drama

Educational Value

Rory O’Connor is a trainer in creativity and creative problem solving. Rory designed the cubes with 54 total images. Players roll 9 cubes to show 9 different images. Then players must take all 9 images to create a story starting with the phrase “Once upon a time…” You aren’t limited to only using the dice in this way. They can be a great way to encourage improve, along with many other uses.

Economics

Educational Value

Catan has players working towards building up their towns and cities. Along the way players must collect resources and use those resources to build; roads, villages, and cities. Often players won’t have access to all the resources creating a high-demand for that type of product. Players will need to trade often at a 2 to 1 rate to get the resources they need.

English

Educational Value

Bananagrams is a face-paced word spelling game. Players race to use all the tiles provided to them in a crossword styled format. The 144 tiles in this game can also be used for many other spelling activities. There is even a version of the game geared towards younger learners.

Educational Value

Two teams compete using adjectives, verbs, shapes and more to describe. The storytellers must be creative to come up with ways to describe the word while the rest of the team guess. For example the storyteller might be “Space Ship”. The clue giving could put down words like; up, fast, hot, red, rectangle, triangle…etc

Environmental

Educational Value

In this cooperative game players take the roles of nations around the world working together to solve the climate crisis. Nations must balance switching over to more green energy while also being able to provide enough power to sustain their own power usage. However if you take too long it will be too late. Work quickly for a cleaner tomorrow.

Foreign Language

There are many games that are great for teaching foreign language but very few that focus on a specific language themselves. Many board games are translated into other languages. Often you can just grab a copy of the board game you like in a language you want to learn.

Geography

Educational Value

In Trekking the World players are traveling to real-world monuments trying to collect artifacts. There are 48 different destinations to visit. This is a great way to learn continents, countries and monuments located around the globe.

Educational Value

Players are racing to visit the national parks across the United States. Players will discover many of the gorgeous real-world national parks. Places that they might hope to someday visit.

Educational Value

Discover the rich history of the U.S. national parks and challenge your friends and family to a clever game of guesstimation. Each trivia card presents an educational tidbit relating to the national parks, followed by a question. The answers to these questions are always numerical, so players will compete to win the card by writing a number on their whiteboard that they think is closest to the correct answer. Even if you know nothing about the national parks, you can still play, learn and win!

Includes over 600 trivia questions, 6 custom national park themed whiteboards and markers, a beautiful trivia card draw box, and a handy infographic all players may use during play.

—description from the publisher

History

Educational Value

Timeline is a card game with cards that depict historical event, invention, etc (depending on version), with the year in which that event occurred on the other side. Players are trying to place the card in the correct spot of its time in history. Players must evaluate which thing they think took place before of after another.

Educational Value

In the game, you go on a three-day tour of human history, traveling thousands of years in a time machine to experience great moments from our past.

The game takes place over three rounds, each representing one day of your trip. Each day, you visit a series of historical events, spending a different number of hours at each.

On each turn, you choose to visit one historical event, and spend a certain number of hours doing it. Doing so will yield benefits, like checking off items on your itinerary for points, and earning Time Crystals so you can bend the space-time continuum on future turns.

Along the way, you’ll also score points for visiting historical events in chronological order.

The player with the most points after three rounds wins.

—description from the publisher

Literature

Math

Many games can be used to teach math outside of games solely focused on educational math. Games have math integrated within them naturally for scoring points and balancing the game. Many aspects of games can be used to teach math but below I will focus more on the upfront numbers type of games.

Educational Value

Combine forces to thwart evil in Outnumbered: Improbable Heroes, a math-based cooperative strategy game. Absolute Zero and his minions are loose in Megatropolis, trying to capture the powerful Infinity Generator! Assemble your team and strategically plan out your sequence of attacks together. As waves of Villains advance, you must use math skills and unique Hero Abilities to hit target numbers, repelling your nemesis and his minions. Overcome their counterattacks and impose order over chaos!

—description from the publisher

Educational Value

Trek 12 is a roll-and-write alpinism game, with progressive difficulty levels and more. To score points, you have to create chains of consecutive numbers from 0 to 12 and areas of a same number.

A game is composed of 19 rolls of two six-sided dice, with one die having values from 1 to 6, and the other from 0 to 5. After each roll, the player must combine both die values to obtain the number to place. You can:

• Add the values of the two dice
• Subtract the value of one die from the other
• Multiply the value of the two dice
• Keep the higher value of the two dice
• Keep the lower value of the two dice

Be careful as you may choose each of these options at most four times during a game. After placing your first number on the game sheet, you must place each subsequent number in a space adjacent to one already filled. You try to make chains and develop areas. Players also have access to several bonus elements to earn during a game.

At the end of a game, numbers that belong to neither a chain nor an area give you minus points. The same applies if you have to place a number greater than 12…

Trek 12 contains three different sheet pads to add narrative with three progressive difficulty levels.

—description from the publisher

Educational Value

Qwixx is a quick dice rolling game. Players have a sheet numbered 2-12 in colored rows, red and yellow, while blue and green are numbered in descending order 12-2. To score points players need to mark off numbers. However you can only mark numbers to the right of the previously marked number. Therefore if you skip too many numbers you will have less options later in the game. Which will result in a lower score.

Music

Educational Value

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is dead. His last conscious action on his deathbed was composing the Lacrimosa movement of his Opus Requiem. You, as one of his sponsors, will meet with the widow in order to participate one last time in the funding of the works of the Austrian genius. Also, you will reminisce and retell all your memories alongside Mozart in order to make sure that she portrays you under the best light when writing her memoirs in order to enter history as Mozart’s most important patron.

In Lacrimosa, players take the roles of patrons of the late musician, contributing with their fundings to the composer’s works one last time. During the game, you play in two different timelines: the present and the past. In the present, you commission the missing parts of the Requiem from other composers in order to complete it. When developing past events, the game takes place in five epochs in which you contribute by buying new compositions from the composer to sell or exhibit, accompany him on the different journeys through the main courts and theaters in Europe, and gather the resources you need in order to support the musician during his career.

During the game, you play cards from a limited hand that you will improve as the game progresses. These cards can be played either as actions or as resource generators, and players need to optimize their resources and finances in order to support their best version of the story and their relationship with Mozart.

—description from the publisher

Educational Value

Timeline is a card game with cards that depict events, music, movies, etc, with the year in which that event occurred on the other side. Players are trying to place the card in the correct spot of its time in history. Players must evaluate which thing they think took place before of after another.

Politics

Educational Value

Players take on the roles of Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Russia or Turkey. The game begins in 1901 spring, in the years leading up to World War 1.

Players only have to type of military units: armies and fleets. On a turn all players will evaluate the current state of the game board and decide were they want to move there armies and fleets writing it down on a piece of paper. Once everyone has decided players compare their movement notes and move their armies and fleets at the same time.

However the twist is int he planning phase. While players are planning their moves they walk around the room negotiating with the other players. Making promises like “If you move our units here I’ll support you with my units for you to attack Germany.” However promises can be broken and what you thought was a good move might turn out Germany was making similar promises but to hurt you.

This is a very intense game that is a lot of fun with huge back stabs. If monitored well students will have a lot of fun with this one.

Educational Value

In Watergate, one player assumes the role of a [Washington Post] Journalist, while the other embodies the Nixon Administration—each with a unique set of cards. To win, the Nixon Administration must build up enough momentum to make it to the end of the presidential term, whereas the Journalist must gather enough evidence to connect two informants directly to the President. Of course, the administration will do all in its power to smother any evidence.

History of Watergate included with the game!
—description from the publisher

Zoology

Educational Value

In Cardline, players have cards that depict animals. Both sides of the cards has the animal’s name, and its class. Only its average length, weight, and lifespan are printed on only one side of the card. At the beginning of the game players decide which aspect of the animal they will be comparing. For example: If comparing weight players must order animals from lightest to heaviest. Players take turns adding cards to the row, with the goal of placing it in the correct spot.

Educational Value

Ecosystem is a card-drafting game in which players choose cards and place them into their play area turn by turn. The cards in a player’s grid make up their own personal ecosystem, and at game’s end, a player will have twenty cards in their ecosystem, with the game including eleven types of cards. Bears score by being placed next to bees and trout; trout score by being placed next to streams and dragonflies; and streams are compared at the end of the game, with the player who has the largest stream earning points. These are just a few examples of how scoring works in Ecosystem. Don’t forget to diversify!

—description from the designer

Educational Value

In 1958, Demitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut started an experiment on domestication. From a large group of foxes, they selected the ones that reacted to humans with more curiosity and less aggression. In each generation, they selected only the friendliest pups to become parents — hoping to recreate the process that originally led to domestication thousands of years ago. The experiment made stunning progress. Even though the foxes were chosen only for their friendliness, they soon started to get many of the physical traits that we associate with domesticated animals — like spots, floppy ears, and curly tails. As communication opened up, the foxes made major contributions to our understanding of how these traits are expressed. The experiment continues to this day.

In The Fox Experiment, you’ll breed your own domesticated foxes. In each round you’ll select a pair of fox parents who have certain traits. You’ll gain those specific trait dice, roll them, then try to move them around to make complete trait symbols which you’ll then mark off on your pup card. You’ll then gain trait tokens depending on how many traits you marked off which you’ll use to upgrade tracks on your personal player board.

At the end of the round, the previous generation of foxes will be cleared and all of the new pups will be moved to the kennel — thus becoming candidates to be chosen as parents in the next round. The game ends after 5 rounds and you’ll gain points for pleasing patrons (end of game scoring bonuses), studies completed (personal player objectives), if you ever won the friendliest fox award, upgrades on your personal player board, and extra tokens. The player with the most points wins!

—description from the publisher

Educational Value

Wingspan has given many who have played the game a new-found interest in birds and nature. The game loosely teaches players what kind of food and environments different birds live in along with facts about them like wingspan and how many eggs they lay.