It turns out that some of my family’s favorite games are educational tools in disguise. Dr. Bill Hudenko, child psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, uses board games in his practice to diagnose and strengthen these much-touted executive function skills. He also encourages parents to play these games with their children at home.

Dr. Hudenko was kind enough to share his five favorite executive function-building games with me, and I recruited my children as unwitting lab rats in a bit of field-testing.

I’m going to start with my 10 year-old son’s favorite game, Swish.



Jessica Lahey/The Atlantic

Skills required: Visual-spatial processing, working memory, attention, concentration, processing speed, and impulse control

Swish consists of a deck of transparent cards with circles and hoops in varying colors and positions. The players must look at an array of as many as 12 cards and identify matches, or “swishes,” in which the appropriately colored circles and hoops of two cards line up. Because the cards are transparent, they may be flipped over and rotated to complete a swish. In an email, Dr. Hudenko elaborated on the benefits of Swish for kids with impulse control and working memory deficits:

Children with executive functioning deficits often struggle with the heavy working memory demands of mentally rotating the cards and sequentially identifying additional card matches. This game also is particularly helpful for developing an appropriate balance between impulse control and increasing processing speed as the child is trying to be the first to identify a “swish.”

My 15-year-old son’s favorite game is Quarto! (I believe because he is our family’s reigning champion).

Jessica Lahey/The Atlantic

Skills required: Working memory, reasoning, planning, attention, and concentration

Quarto! is played with a board and 16 pieces that each have four different physical attributes: height, shape, color, and indentation or flatness. The object of Quarto! is to line up four pieces that share the same attribute, but that goal is not as simple as it sounds, because you don’t get to choose which piece you play—your opponent does.

Quarto! taxes players’ working memory and attention because there are so many possible configurations of the game pieces. In order to prevent your opponent from winning, you must figure out all the possible winning moves available to your opponent and not give him or her those pieces. While the game is complex in practice, younger children can understand the rules and improve their working memory as they improve. For children who really need to work on their ability to plan and create systems, Dr. Hudenko recommends the following adaptation:

Allow the child to create his or her own system to keep track of which pieces should not be given to the opponent. If the child requires prompting to develop a system, provide her or him with a paper and pencil and suggest that he or she can write down or draw which pieces would lead to defeat if they were given to the opponent. This approach can create a wonderful learning opportunity wherein children recognize the importance of using assistive techniques to compensate for difficulties with executive functioning.

One game that most families have stashed away in a box or trunk is Chess, and it’s a one of the world’s oldest and most popular strategy games.

Jessica Lahey/The Atlantic

Skills required: Attention, concentration, working memory, reasoning, planning, problem solving, and impulse control