Board Games and Entrepreneurial Skills Acquisition: Efficacy of the EntreComp Framework in Higher Education

This study examines whether board games can serve as an effective vehicle for teaching entrepreneurial competencies in higher education, using the European Entrepreneurship Competence Framework (EntreComp) as its organizing structure. Drawing on the "Game It Away!" project at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, the authors investigate which EntreComp competencies are most effectively developed through gamified, board-game-based learning. The work positions gamification and board games as active learning approaches that can boost engagement, motivation, and soft skills such as communication, negotiation, and collaboration.

The empirical component consists of two pilot studies conducted in a university makerspace, with a target of 25 participants per pilot. The first pilot enrolled a diverse group of undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students, with the second drawing only 11 undergraduates, all Portuguese. Both pilots followed a five-phase methodology: an icebreaker, a theoretical overview of EntreComp and game design, theme selection, prototype creation, and a pitch presentation, with learning journals used throughout as the principal source of reflective data. Participants in both pilots rated their satisfaction at an average of 4.5 out of 5 on a Likert scale, and students reliably identified the intended competencies in one another's games without thematic repetition across groups.

The authors acknowledge notable limitations. Participants reported wanting more prototyping time and less theoretical content, and the second pilot revealed group discord over theme and competency selection. The study's sample sizes are small, the data rely heavily on self-reported satisfaction and reflections, and the paper provides limited detail on how competency acquisition was measured, so its conclusions about skill development remain preliminary. The authors note plans for a third pilot to refine the methodology.