Best educational board games for ages 8-14?

Ticket to Ride: geography, strategy, probability. Timeline: history in card form. Pandemic: cooperative thinking under pressure. All three earn their place.

7 Wonders teaches civilisation-building. Azul develops spatial reasoning. Wingspan teaches ecology and bird biology genuinely well.

Codenames is our vocabulary game. Dixit develops analogical reasoning. SET is pure mathematical set theory.

Catan builds resource economics thinking from age 10. Our 14-year-old played Twilight Imperium and understood the Cold War better afterwards.