Cognitive Teleintervention With Board Games During the Pandemic Lockdown in School-Age Children

A pilot randomized controlled trial examined whether a remotely delivered board game program could support executive functions in school-age children during the COVID-19 lockdown in Spain. The study enrolled 25 children aged 5 to 12, with 15 assigned to a 12-session gamified intervention and 10 to a wait-list control group. The program adapted commercial games such as Blurble, Monster Match, Sherlock Express, Streams, and Bee Alert for videoconference play, with physical components projected through a webcam and players responding by voice or chat, and targeted visuospatial working memory, inhibition, reasoning, planning, and verbal fluency.

The most consistent findings concerned cognitive flexibility and verbal fluency. Across the full sample, pre-post comparisons showed significant improvements in flexibility and in both phonological and semantic fluency, and the play group showed larger gains in flexibility and phonological fluency than controls. Among children in the play group, these gains were concentrated in those reporting high satisfaction with the sessions and games. Results for visuospatial working memory were mixed: the control group unexpectedly improved on this measure and on semantic fluency, and several other outcomes showed no significant time effects.

The authors conclude that remotely delivered board games may offer modest benefits for cognitive flexibility and verbal fluency, but they stress that the evidence is preliminary. The very small sample, baseline differences between groups, and the possibility that control-group board game play confounded the comparison all limit the strength of these conclusions. They also suggest that face-to-face play may yield greater benefits than remote delivery, positioning the work as an exploratory step rather than a definitive demonstration of efficacy.