The use of modern board games has been growing past years in education, research, and mental health attendance. Often one professional selects games by his/her criteria depending on his/her objective with them. We evaluated the cognitive processes inherent to each modern board game to obtain a consensus of the cognitive profile of each. We explain how to choose the most suitable board games in future interventions.
Materials and Methods:
Fifteen education, mental health, and neuroscience research professionals with board games experience participated in an online assessment of 27 modern board games. Experts received a virtual neuroeducation formation and played the games selection for further analysis. Participants answered a Likert scale about 12 cognitive processes activated with each game.
Results:
All modern board games obtained a high level of agreement (intraclass correlation [ICC] > 0.75). Besides, most cognitive processes reached a high agreement, except for cognitive flexibility and problem-solving (moderate range: 0.5 > ICC > 0.75). Differentiated cognitive profiles have been obtained for each game, some of which could work on more than one cognitive domain at a time. Finally, initial evidence about which board game mechanisms activate with cognitive domain was found.
Conclusion:
To conclude, this expert consensus methodology became a useful tool for assessing the cognitive profile behind modern board and card games. The results obtained may facilitate the choice of games to be used in future studies depending on the objective cognitive domain to be trained under a criterion based on the observations of a group of experts and not just the researcher's individual criteria.
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