Scrabble
In case you’ve never heard of this before, Scrabble aims to create words with the tiles available at hand. Often, those who play this game improve their vocabulary, and it helps develop strategy skills and creativity. For children, Scrabble is the perfect game that helps them with basic math and spelling.

Chess
No list of board games that help to develop thinking abilities and life skills is complete without the game of chess. Chess needs no introduction: created in India, it’s been around for over 500 years and is one of the world’s most popular strategy games.
Playing chess promotes brain growth–specifically, it fuels dendrite growth–, and it exercises both sides of the brain. In addition, playing chess can increase IQ. A study conducted in Venezuela involving 4,000 students found that 4 months of chess instruction increased the students’ IQ scores.
In addition, chess teaches a plethora of valuable skills, including the following:
• It teaches focus and concentration – In order to play chess well you have to focus completely on the board that’s in front of you. As you constantly visualize the board, its pieces, your moves, and your opponent’s possible counter-moves, your power of concentration grows.
• It teaches planning and foresight – Chess teaches foresight by having to plan ahead.
• It improves logical thinking – When you’re playing chess, you have to keep saying the following to yourself: “If I do this, then my opponent is likely to do that.” That’s logical thinking in action.
Here’s a quote from Benjamin Franklin about learning from chess: “We learn from chess the greatest maxim in life – that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.”

Mancala
Mancala is a two player game that is played on a wooden board with two rows of six holes carved into it. Many things can be used as game pieces, including beans, seeds, nuts, marbles, stones, and shells. The object of Mancala is to have the most pieces in your Kalaha, or storage unit.
Mancala has been played for thousands of years in Africa and different parts of the Middle East. There are also versions in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Mancala can teach all of the following:
• It teaches observation skills — Players need to distinguish good plays from bad ones.
• It teaches how to think analytically – Players must learn to plan and develop strategies.
• It teaches problem solving — Whenever there’s a gap between the way things are, and the way you want them to be, you have a problem. At the start of a game of Mancala, the Kahalas are empty, while the players want them to be full. Players have to move their pieces in a way that will allow them to get the greatest number of pieces into their Kahala, while trying to prevent the other player from doing the same.

LUDO
Ludo is a strategy board game for two to four players, in which the players race their four tokens from start to finish according to the rolls of a single die. It teaches good sportsmanship, the value taking turns, sharing, and instills the spirit of competitiveness in a proper way.