ABSTRACT
The notion of change is at the heart of board-game playing. With every move, the situation on the board is modified, sometimes drastically, as in bao or awele. Change also affects players, through learning and development. Learning can be defined as change in explicit or implicit knowledge that affects one’s behaviour. Development also has a biological connotation and refers broadly to a sequence of changes over years. Both terms are ill defined in the literature, and it is often difficult to classify empirical studies unambiguously under one of these labels. Studies with adults tend to involve more learning, although the effects of ageing start to affect performance from early adulthood onwards. Studies with children tend to deal more with development, although it is often impossible to partial out the effect of learning.
