How to Play Board Games?: A Framework Proposal for Classroom Settings

This article proposes a structured, teacher-guided framework for using strategic board games in classrooms, with Pentago serving as the central illustrative case. Grounded in Brousseau's Theory of Didactical Situations, the authors contend that board games are commonly deployed in schools for their emotional and social benefits while cognitive learning goes largely unplanned. Their central thesis is that deliberate sequencing of gameplay can convert entertainment into targeted learning in reasoning, critical thinking, and communication.

The framework comprises six steps: encounter with the game, understanding cause-effect relationships, strategy development (through experience-based inference, predictive play, and building move sequences), clarification, verification, and evaluation. A key finding is that teachers should guide students through questions grounded in concrete play rather than supplying strategies directly, since teacher-provided strategies were shown to undermine students' conceptual understanding and intellectual satisfaction.

The worked example applies the framework to Pentago, a two-player game on a 6x6 board whose simple rules conceal a complex combinatorial strategy space. The authors highlight the board's rotation mechanic as a source of analytical depth: central slots contribute to multiple potential winning lines, while the strategic value of corner marbles shifts with rotation. Students are encouraged to anticipate moves several turns ahead and to test their hypotheses against peers.

The study's scope is conceptual and pedagogical, drawing on mathematics education, game theory, and board game scholarship, and it is published in the Board Game Studies Journal (Erdogan, Atasay Sunay, & Eryılmaz Çevirgen, 2022). The authors acknowledge that board game settings are socially rich yet tend to keep cognitive experience individual, and they conclude that structured reflection is what transforms such settings into genuine learning environments. They also stress that teachers should adapt the framework to specific games and to students' skill levels.