A Board Game Approach to Hospitality Career Education in Schools

This paper examines whether a board game can broaden early adolescents' awareness of hospitality careers, a sector often perceived as low-skilled despite its demand for transferable skills. The authors present Adventures in Hospitality Land, a game designed on design-based research principles and piloted with 68 students in Malta. Its central aim is to test whether game-based learning can make hospitality career pathways visible to young learners who may not otherwise consider them, situating the work within literature on game-based learning, social cognitive career theory, and hospitality workforce studies.

The pilot compared a Full version of the game (n=45) with a streamlined Lite version (n=23), developed after the Full version proved too long for a 45-minute lesson. The headline findings are that 84.1% of students named a previously unknown hospitality role after play, and that the Lite redesign sharply reduced perceived rules difficulty, from 71.1% to 17.4%, with no Lite players reporting low enjoyment. Educational outcomes remained nearly identical across versions, with 60.0% versus 60.9% reporting learning about tourism roles and 82.2% versus 87.0% naming a previously unknown hospitality role. The authors conclude that targeted simplification preserved learning while improving accessibility.

The scope is limited to a single small pilot in one national context, with no control group and only single-session follow-up, which constrains generalisability to other schools, cultures, or longer-term career outcomes. The study was partially funded by the Malta Tourism Authority, a disclosure relevant to interpreting its favourable framing. Taken together, the evidence supports the feasibility and short-term promise of tabletop games as an entry point to hospitality career education, while leaving questions of sustained impact on career intentions open for future research.