Heart-Rate Board Games: Where Physiology Meets Play

In a recent CHI 2025 paper, Tu and colleagues ask a deceptively simple question: what happens if you bring heart-rate biofeedback to the board-game table and make it part of the rules, not just a background metric? Their study, Designing Biofeedback Board Games: The Impact of Heart Rate on Player Experience, is new emerging research with novel insights at the intersection of human–computer interaction, psychophysiology, and game design.

Board games are already little social laboratories: we bluff, cooperate, feel tense, get over-invested in cardboard tokens, and then hopefully stay friends afterwards. Add biofeedback to the mix and suddenly the body becomes another game component. Your heart rate can betray your bluff, sink your team, unlock a power, or be weaponized by your opponents. The authors explore how to do this without turning a cosy tabletop session into a clunky gadget demo.

In this context, biofeedback refers to methods that measure physiological signals—such as heart rate, breathing, skin conductance or muscle tension—and return that information to the person in real time so they can learn to voluntarily regulate it. Neurofeedback is a specialized form of biofeedback that uses brain activity (often EEG) as the signal to train, helping the brain learn healthier or more efficient patterns of functioning. We’ll keep those definitions here in the introduction only and use them implicitly afterwards.

What makes this study particularly interesting for our world of clinical biofeedback and neurofeedback is not just the gadgets, but the design thinking. Tu and colleagues use a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach to iteratively co-create a fully playable social deduction game, One Pulse: Treasure Hunter, with heart-rate data at its core. Along the way, they uncover how physical space, social roles, display choices, and fairness concerns shape how people experience physiology-as-gameplay.

If you’ve ever tried to keep a teenager with disruptive behaviours engaged in HRV training, or a burnt-out adult focused during alpha-theta sessions, you’ll probably already feel where this is going: there is a lot we can borrow from this work to make psychophysiological training more playful, social, and sticky.

Methods

Tu and colleagues do not test a therapeutic intervention; instead, they build and refine a game system where heart-rate becomes a central mechanic. Their methodology is therefore design-heavy and iterative, with strong qualitative elements. Over 18 months, they move through three main research phases, each feeding into the next.

Research-through-Design framework

The authors explicitly adopt a Research-through-Design (RtD) approach, structured using the “double diamond” model: diverging to explore possibilities, then converging to refine and deliver a concrete design.

Across phases, they work with:

• 10 enthusiast analog board-game designers (Phase 1)

• 20 HCI researchers in participatory design workshops (Phase 2)

• 5 industry experts (designers, café owner, publisher, artist; Phase 3)

The result is not just a conceptual framework but a playable prototype—One Pulse: Treasure Hunter—that embodies their design choices about heart-rate biofeedback in multiplayer tabletop settings.

Phase 1 – Attitudes toward digital integration (RP1)

Phase 1 asks a simple but important question: what do analog board-game designers actually think about integrating digital elements and physiological data into their games?

• Participants: 10 analog board-game designers and enthusiasts (various experience levels, mostly in North America and Europe).

• Method: semi-structured interviews (~29 minutes on average), conducted online or offline.

• Focus:

  • Comfort with using heart-rate data in social deception games

  • Concerns about fairness, complexity, and intrusiveness

  • Thoughts on how physical space and seating shape social cues

Thematic analysis yields three “Design Philosophies” that become the backbone of later phases:

1. Playing space and social interaction – how seating, distance, and table layout affect social cues and deception.

2. Visual display of biometric data – where and how heart-rate information should appear (shared vs individual, numeric vs symbolic).

3. Learning curve and application over time – how players adapt to heart-rate mechanics and how strategy evolves over multiple plays.

Phase 2 – Participatory design workshops (RP2)

Phase 2 turns the problem into drawings, mockups, and concrete ideas. Two participatory design workshops bring in 20 HCI researchers with hybrid board-game experience.

Participants are asked to sketch three things:

1. How they envision the playing space (table, room, seating).

2. How they would display heart-rate data.

3. What game mechanics could use HR in interesting ways.

From these sketches and group discussions, the authors identify seven “Design Sketch Implementations” (DSIs) for displaying HR:

• DSI1 – Heads-up display (e.g., helmet/VR-style visuals)

• DSI2 – Smartwatch display (with haptics as triggers)

• DSI3 – Shirt display with LEDs

• DSI4 – Smartphone display (most frequent suggestion)

• DSI5 – Board/tabletop display or interactive surface

• DSI6 – Props-based display (weapons, artefacts showing HR)

• DSI7 – Card-based display (RFID-triggered events, escape-room style)

Key methodological decisions emerging from this phase:

• Use numerical heart-rate displays (beats per minute), not just colours or icons, for clarity.

• Consider baseline differences: some players have naturally high or low resting heart rates, which matters for fairness.

• Explore unified vs non-unified seating: equal spacing versus more asymmetric, role-heavy layouts.

Phase 3 – Expert review and game prototyping (RP3)

Phase 3 shifts towards concrete implementation and rapid iteration with five industry experts (designers, café owner, publisher, artist).

Hardware choice

Experts help select an HR sensor that balances price, accuracy, and comfort: the Polar H10 chest-strap monitor. Reasons:

• ECG-based measurement with good accuracy for fast changes.

• Less motion artefact than wrist-worn devices when players move their hands to manipulate pieces.

• Access to an API for integration with the game system.

Heart-rate data is streamed via Pulsoid to smartphones, which act as the visible displays for the players’ HR in real time.

Game system: One Pulse – Treasure Hunter

The outcome of this phase is a fully playable prototype:

• Player count: 5 (3 Hunters, 2 Guardians/spies).

• Genre: social deduction game.

• Theme: ruined forest, portals, treasure missions.

• Setup: each player wears a Polar H10; each has a smartphone on a 3D-printed stand facing away from them, visible primarily to others.

Core HR-related mechanics include:

• Group HR threshold: If the Hunters’ combined heart rate exceeds a threshold (resting sum + 10 bpm) for more than 30 seconds, the mission fails.

• Synchronization bonus: If Hunters can synchronize their heart rates within 10 bpm for 10 seconds, all HR data is hidden in the next mission round.

• Treasure unlock: Successful mission completion grants a card that allows players to hide any one player’s HR for a minute by triggering a “treasure chest” prop.

Treasure cards define tasks like:

• Holding breath for 30 seconds

• Remaining still

• Staring at your own HR

• Holding hands

• Jumping or flipping coins

These missions intentionally modulate arousal and HR, creating interesting tension between physiological regulation and deception strategy.

A follow-up playtest in a board-game café provides qualitative observations about how players actually respond to these mechanics in the wild.

Results

Rather than reporting statistics, the paper presents a rich set of design implications and observational findings. We can group them into three broad areas: physical space, display & data, and social dynamics.

1. Playing space and seating

From interviews and workshops, the authors find that the physical layout of the game has a strong impact on how heart-rate information is perceived and used.

• Unified seating – when players are equidistant around the table, interaction feels more egalitarian. Nonverbal cues are easier to read, and the emotional intensity is shared more evenly.

• Non-unified seating – asymmetrical layouts can create perceived power dynamics (e.g., one player isolated on a side, or “head of the table” roles), which can amplify dominance in conversation and sway deception outcomes.

Players describe cramped, close layouts as “claustrophobic but intense”: everyone can feel everyone else’s tension. More spread layouts reduce that but can weaken the subtle social signal reading that makes biofeedback interesting.

2. Display of biometric data

The design space for showing heart-rate turned out to be surprisingly broad, but the team converged on smartphones as the most practical implementation. Key results:

• Smartphone displays are:

  • Familiar (many hybrid board games already rely on apps).

  • Cheap to implement (most players already own one).

  • Flexible: can show group averages, individual HRs, or temporary hiding of data.

• Visibility matters

  • When displays are fully shared, HR becomes a social resource: people point, joke, accuse, and strategize around numerical changes.

  • When data is partially hidden (e.g., via treasure unlock or synchronized-HR bonuses), players lean more on interpersonal cues again.

• Numeric vs symbolic: participants and experts favour numeric BPM values. Symbolic-only (e.g., only colours) is evocative but can feel arbitrary or unfair if players don’t know what “red” really means in relation to their own baseline.

• Baseline differences: players with naturally high resting HR sometimes feel disadvantaged or “exposed” compared to those with low baselines. This fairness issue comes up in negotiations and role accusations.

3. Social dynamics, deception, and heart rate

The playtest of One Pulse: Treasure Hunter reveals how live HR actually shapes interaction:

• Conversation clusters around HR: players continually comment on the numbers (“Look, you spiked when I accused you!”), which can both enrich and distract from strategic thinking.

• Dominant talkers emerge: one or two players often drive interpretations of HR data, effectively controlling group perception and accusations.

• Role–HR associations:

  • Hunters (truth-tellers) tend to show lower average HRs.

  • Guardians (deceivers) show higher HRs, likely reflecting cognitive load, anxiety, or excitement.

  • These differences are visible enough that players start treating HR changes as possible indicators of lying—though, importantly, not in a perfectly reliable way.

• Fairness concerns: some players argue that their “naturally high heart rate” shouldn’t be used against them, revealing a tension between physiological individuality and game balance.

Overall, the results show that heart-rate can meaningfully heighten tension, support novel mechanics (such as synchronized calm), and deepen social deduction—but only if designers respect issues of fairness, visibility, and cognitive load.

Discussion

Tu and colleagues set out to explore how heart-rate biofeedback could be meaningfully integrated into multiplayer board games. What they actually deliver is a map of design tensions that feels very familiar to clinicians working with psychophysiological tools: how much to show, to whom, in what format, under which social conditions, and with what expectations.

Let’s unpack some of the broader themes and then connect them to biofeedback and neurofeedback practice.

From raw physiology to meaningful play

A central challenge addressed by the paper is: How do we turn noisy, individual, dynamic heart-rate data into something that feels like a fair and fun game mechanic?

Several design choices are particularly insightful:

• Using thresholds based on players’ resting HRs, rather than fixed numbers, acknowledges physiological individuality.

• Framing HR not only as a risk (mission fails if threshold is exceeded) but also as a resource (synchronizing HR hides data; treasure unlocks let you manipulate information) turns physiology into a strategic tool, not just a lie detector.

• Allowing players to influence each other’s HR (e.g., provoking, teasing during missions) shores up the inherently social nature of biofeedback in a group setting.

In clinical language: they build contingencies around physiological states. The heart-rate isn’t just measured; it has immediate, meaningful consequences in the system. That’s exactly what we try to do in biofeedback and neurofeedback training—just usually with less treasure and fewer accusations.

Social context is not a side dish

One of the most powerful messages from this work is that the room matters. Whether players are squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder around a round table or stretched across a big space changes how easily they can read micro-expressions, body language, and even notice HR fluctuations on screens.

For real-world training:

• Group biofeedback sessions (e.g., HRV classes, relaxation groups) will naturally have similar dynamics. Who sits where, who can see whose data, and who tends to dominate interpretation all change how safe—or exposed—participants feel.

• A “unified” spatial setup with equal distances and shared visibility may foster more balanced interaction, but it can also raise anxiety for those who already feel scrutinized.

• Conversely, “non-unified” seating (as in a therapist + client setting) can explicitly distribute power and safety but make shared physiological data feel less like a collective game and more like an evaluation.

Tu and colleagues show, in a playful laboratory, how these spatial decisions play out when physiology becomes public.

Heart rate as truth serum? Caution ahead

The game invites players to treat heart-rate spikes as suspicion triggers. And indeed, in their playtest, deceivers often had higher HR. But the paper is careful to note that this is neither perfectly reliable nor necessarily fair, especially in a leisure context where people come with very different baselines and anxiety levels.

For clinicians, this is a helpful reminder:

• Heart rate and HRV are powerful indicators of arousal and regulation, but they are not moral metrics.

• Individuals with high trait anxiety, cardiovascular differences, medication effects, or neurodevelopmental profiles may respond with “false positives” to social pressure.

• If we turn physiology into “evidence” (you’re lying, you’re not trying, you’re not relaxed enough), we risk shaming instead of supporting.

The game format is a safe sandbox for this dynamic; real clinical practice is not.

Design lessons for clinical practice

Even though the paper lives in the HCI/game-design world, several of its concrete design decisions are directly portable into biofeedback/neurofeedback work:

1. Make feedback diegetic when possible

   • In the game, HR information is woven into the fiction (treasure hunts, portals, missions).

   • In clinic, we can similarly embed feedback into meaningful narratives: flights through calm skies, “shield charging” through regulated breathing, cooperative missions with shared targets for group regulation.

2. Balance visibility and privacy

   • The authors experiment with shared displays, individual screens, and temporary hiding of HR.

   • In therapy, we might:

     • Let clients choose when to show their traces to a parent or partner.

     • Use “group metrics” (average HRV) in classes rather than individual traces projected on a wall.

3. Reward process, not just outcomes

   • Synchronizing HR as a group to unlock hidden information rewards coordination and engagement, not just “low HR”.

   • Similarly, we can design training where sustained effort and strategy exploration matter at least as much as hitting a rigid threshold.

Interpretive lens: biofeedback as co-regulated play

Stepping back, Tu and colleagues’ work can be read as a case study in co-regulation. Heart-rate is not just an internal variable; it becomes part of a shared system where each player’s physiology is shaped by—and shapes—the behaviour of others.

This maps beautifully onto emerging views of emotion regulation and interpersonal physiology:

• We regulate not only “inside our own heads” but also through interaction, shared attention, and mutual cues.

• Turning physiological regulation into something playful and social may lower barriers for populations who find introspective, quiet training very difficult (e.g., some adolescents, individuals with ADHD, highly avoidant or externally oriented clients).

In that sense, One Pulse: Treasure Hunter is less a weird board game and more a glimpse of how we might build relational biofeedback experiences—where the goal is not just “calm yourself” but “manage tension together under constraints.”

Brendan’s perspective

Let’s shift from the research lab and the board-game café into the clinic. What does a heart-rate social deduction game have to do with EEG neurofeedback protocols, resonance-breathing sessions, or qEEG-guided treatment plans? Quite a lot, actually.

1. Engagement is not a luxury; it’s a mechanism

Neurofeedback and biofeedback live or die on engagement. If the client is bored, oppositional, or emotionally checked out, those beautifully tuned SMR or alpha protocols will underperform. Tu and colleagues essentially ask:

How can we make physiological engagement inherently fun, tense, and meaningful?

In my own clinical view, this is not optional “gamification fluff” around the “real” work; it’s part of the learning mechanism. Operant conditioning and voluntary self-regulation depend on attention, motivation, and emotional salience.

A teenager with disruptive behaviour who couldn’t care less about their breathing trace might care a lot about whether their heart rate betrays them in a bluff, or whether their team loses because they couldn’t stay calm under pressure. The physiological learning is the same—the narrative wrapper is completely different. You just have to remember to go back to the boring stuff to make sure transfer occurs.

2. From solo training to co-regulation labs

Most neurofeedback sessions are one-on-one: client and clinician, sometimes parent or partner. Biofeedback sessions are increasingly offered in groups (especially HRV or relaxation classes), but often still structured as “everyone does their own exercise while we all happen to be in the same room.”

This paper nudges us toward a different paradigm:

• What if some sessions were explicitly co-regulation sessions, where the group’s physiological state is the training target?

• Imagine:

  • A small group of adolescents wearing HR and maybe one or two EEG sensors, working together to keep a shared “calm bar” within range while solving puzzles.

  • A parent–child dyad tasked with lowering their combined arousal to unlock the next step in a cooperative task.

  • A performance-anxious musician and their teacher learning to recognize and jointly modulate HR/EEG changes during simulated performances.

The lesson from One Pulse: Treasure Hunter is clear: physiology becomes much more engaging when it is relational and consequential in the shared space.

3. Translating the design principles into EEG neurofeedback

Let’s talk protocols. You might reasonably ask: how do we go from heart-rate-based mechanics to EEG-focused training? Here’s one way to think about it: use the same design logic, but change the signals.

• For behavioural inhibition and impulse control, we often work with SMR (12–15 Hz) training over central regions (e.g., Cz, C3/C4), sometimes combined with theta suppression.

• For anxiety and stress, alpha enhancement (8–12 Hz) over posterior sites (Pz, O1/O2) or midline, often alongside HRV breathing, is a frequent choice.

• For attention, theta/beta ratio training over frontal or central sites (e.g., Fz, Cz) is common.

Instead of simply rewarding these bands with quiet feedback and a generic animation, we can borrow from Tu et al.’s playbook:

• Threshold-based events:

  • When SMR stays above threshold for X seconds, a cooperative game element advances (bridge builds, door opens, shared avatar progresses).

  • If theta spikes (distraction) at the wrong moment, the group loses a “focus token.”

• Synchronization mechanics:

  • Two clients training together might be rewarded when both maintain alpha or SMR in range simultaneously, encouraging not just self-regulation but empathic pacing and shared calming.

• Visibility modulation:

  • Sometimes you show everyone’s EEG-based “state indicator”; sometimes you only show one person’s and let others guess. This echoes the temporary hiding of HR in One Pulse and makes the internal state a playful mystery to be inferred.

The key is: the EEG parameters become active rules in a shared mini-world, not just background bar graphs.

4. Individualisation: the always-moving target

The fairness issues raised in the board-game study (some people have higher resting HR; some spike more easily) are a direct mirror of what we face with EEG and HRV:

• Some clients have low HRV but extremely high motivation; others have “normal” baselines but fragile affect regulation.

• Some have qEEG profiles with dramatic deviations (frontal excess theta, posterior low alpha); others are subtle.

In both game and clinic, the answer is: individualise the thresholds and the meanings.

In practice, that looks like:

• Using qEEG assessments to establish meaningful deviation patterns before starting EEG training.

• Calibrating feedback thresholds so that early sessions reward relatively modest improvements (successive approximations), and only later require more stable, robust regulation.

• In group or dyadic setups, explicitly explaining that each person’s nervous system is different and the game/feedback is tuned to that individual—this avoids the “my heart is just broken” or “my brain is worse than theirs” spiral.

Tu and colleagues’ decision to define HR thresholds relative to baseline (resting sum + 10 bpm) is exactly the type of individualisation we want to mirror in EEG protocols.

5. Complementary techniques: HRV, breathing, and beyond

The missions in One Pulse—holding breath, staying still, holding hands—serve as playful proxies for techniques we already use clinically: paced breathing, stillness, and tactile co-regulation.

In practice, we might:

• Combine HRV biofeedback (breathing at resonance frequency around 0.1 Hz) with:

  • Frontal beta down for rumination and overthinking.

  • Posterior alpha up for relaxation and sensory grounding.

• Pair SMR training with small, concrete tasks that test behavioural inhibition (e.g., “don’t press the key when X appears”), but frame those tasks inside a coherent narrative or cooperative challenge rather than repetitive, sterile stimuli.

You can almost imagine a clinical “treasure hunt”: each successful period of regulation (stable HRV, consistent SMR, reduced theta/beta ratio) reveals pieces of a larger image, story, or puzzle that is personally meaningful to the client. The physiology, again, is not floating alone; it does something in their world.

6. Research vs real-world practice: different constraints

Tu and colleagues work with carefully controlled setups, uniform hardware (Polar H10, iPhone 7), a fixed player count, and a specific game. In clinical practice, we juggle:

• Unpredictable schedules

• Varying hardware (from high-quality clinical amplifiers to crappy consumer-grade headsets)

• Context! (Like the presence of family members in the room)

• Time constraints (45–60 minutes for intake, explanation, setup, artefact cleaning, and actual training)

So we don’t need to reproduce One Pulse in our clinics. Instead, we can borrow patterns:

• Short, clearly structured mini-phases (missions) with explicit start and end, similar to their treasure cards.

• Simple, visible mappings between physiological change and meaningful in-world outcomes.

• Occasional “social rounds” where multiple people (e.g., family members) share responsibility for keeping a metric in range.

The research also underscores the importance of careful onboarding. The experts in Phase 3 stress that the first rounds of the game should essentially teach the mechanics by doing, rather than dumping a rulebook on players. In neurofeedback, that corresponds to:

• Keeping the first sessions light, exploratory, and success-focused.

• Using metaphors and visuals that are easy to grasp (“charging a battery,” “keeping the ship steady”) rather than immediately offering dense, technical descriptions.

7. A gentle warning: don’t turn therapy into interrogation

Finally, a more critical note. Reading this study, it’s tempting to think: “Great, we can tell when someone is lying from heart rate.” Even in the playful context of the game, this is shaky. In the clinical context, it’s a trap.

Neurofeedback and biofeedback are at their best when they cultivate curiosity, self-efficacy, and compassion toward one’s own nervous system. If we import the “detection” mindset too literally—using physiology to catch people out—we risk replicating some of the least helpful dynamics of school, workplace evaluations, or policing, right inside our therapeutic space.

My recommendation, inspired by the One Pulse design, is to use physiology against the challenge, not against the person. The boss in the game might “feed” on group arousal; the puzzle might only unlock when everyone is calmer. The “adversary” is the scenario, not the nervous system of the client.

When we hold that line, we can borrow all the creativity and playfulness of Tu and colleagues’ heart-rate board game without importing adversarial energy into a space meant for healing.

Conclusion

Tu and colleagues’ work on Designing Biofeedback Board Games: The Impact of Heart Rate on Player Experience shows that heart-rate can be much more than a quiet line in the background. It can become a living game mechanic that shapes cooperation, deception, tension, and laughter around a table.

By systematically exploring how to integrate HR into hybrid board games—through interviews, participatory design, expert reviews, and a fully playable prototype—the authors map out design trade-offs that should sound very familiar to anyone working with biofeedback and neurofeedback:

• How visible should physiological data be?

• How do we respect individual baselines and fairness?

• How does the physical space and seating arrangement change how safe, exposed, or engaged people feel?

• What kinds of rules make physiology meaningful without turning it into a judgment tool?

For clinical practice, the take-home is encouraging: we can make physiological training more engaging, more social, and more playful without sacrificing scientific seriousness or therapeutic goals. Drawing inspiration from One Pulse: Treasure Hunter, we can design neurofeedback and biofeedback experiences where the body’s signals are not just corrected—but invited into stories, games, and shared missions.

In the end, physiology loves context. Whether on a wooden table covered with cards and laughter, or in a quiet office with EEG caps and breathing sensors, our nervous system learns best when the feedback it receives is rich, meaningful, and emotionally alive. Harnessing that principle—with care and creativity—is one of the most powerful ways we can help brains and bodies change for the better.

References

Tu, J., Kukshinov, E., Mogavi, R. H., Wang, D. M., & Nacke, L. E. (2025). Designing biofeedback board games: The impact of heart rate on player experience. In CHI ’25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (21 pp.). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713543