Playing board games for just under four hours on Christmas day will burn off your roast dinner!

The holiday season is upon us, and with it comes an abundance of festive cheer, delicious food, and — for many of us — hours of fun playing our favourite games. However, it can also leave us needing to unbuckle our belts after multiple helpings of roast potatoes during Christmas dinner. 

Fortunately, new research from Betway has revealed that playing board games could help burn off those extra calories. They asked 11 participants wearing heart rate trackers to play eight different board games for 30 minutes each, revealing which games are the most fun to play and which burn the most calories overall. 

You can find the full research here: https://blog.betway.com/casino/the-board-game-experiment-the-top-heart-pumping-board-games/ 

Cards Against Humanity is the most exciting game, causing players’ average max heart rate to rise to 123 BPM

The experiment revealed that Cards Against Humanity caused the biggest increase in heart rates, with the average heart rate rising to 101 BPM (beats per minute). With players' average resting heart rate being 67 BPM, that’s a significant increase of 34 BPM. 

Meanwhile, the maximum heart rate hit 123 BPM with one players’ average maximum heart rate rising to a whopping 159 BPM, 36 BPM more than the average maximum.

Trivial Pursuit takes second place, with its fast-paced nature causing an average heart rate of 93 BPM and an average maximum heart rate of 121 BPM. The highest heart rate recorded during a game of Trivial Pursuit was 153 BPM — a respectable jump from the average resting heart rate of participants (67 BPM).

In third place is Monopoly, the classic board game of buying and selling properties. The competition and strategising sent players' hearts racing, leading to an average heart rate of 96 BPM and an average max of 119 BPM. 

*Table ranked by average maximum heart rate.

Cluedo and Scrabble rank as the most relaxing games on the list, with the smallest increases in heart rate among players

Cluedo ranks as the most relaxing game on the list. Although this classic murder mystery game did cause a spike in heart rates, with the average hitting 89 BPM and the average max rate at 114 BPM, this is a much smaller increase than for other games like Cards Against Humanity. 

Scrabble also ranks among the slightly more relaxing games, with players’ heart rates rising to an average of 91 BPM and an average max of 114 BPM — the same as Cluedo. Given it’s a much slower-paced game than some others on the list, it’s not surprising to see it trigger a smaller spike in heart rates.

It takes 1 hour 18 mins of playing Cards Against Humanity to burn off a serving of Christmas Pudding, and 3 hours 15 mins to burn off a roast

Betway’s experiment revealed that just 30 minutes of playing a board game burns 105 calories on average, which adds up to 210 in an hour. With a roast dinner containing an average of 812 calories, you’d need to play board games for an average 3 hours and 51 minutes to fully burn this off.

Cards Against Humanity burns the most calories of all, with players burning an average of 125 calories during 30 minutes of playing, or 250 in one hour. This means that in just 1 hour 18 minutes, you can burn off a single serving of Christmas Pudding (which contains an average of 326 calories), or an entire roast dinner in just 3 hours 15 minutes.

Articulate ranks second, working off an average of 116 calories in just 30 minutes. That adds up to 232 calories burned in one hour, which is equivalent to nearly five Pigs in Blankets (which contain an average of 47.5 calories each). 

Meanwhile, you could burn off an entire mince pie (which contain 221 calories on average) by playing Monopoly for just one hour.

Will you be playing board games this Christmas and are you surprised at how many calories you could burn whilst doing so?