Abstract Despite its potential, empirical evidence of the educational effectiveness of Digital Game-based Learning (DGBL) for manufacturing education is still limited. To this respect, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Game was developed in order to explain in an interactive way to university students life cycle assessment, a tool which is becoming increasingly important for sustainable manufacturing. The study was based on a two-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design involving 62 participants and was aiming at understanding the impact of LCA Game on both learning and motivation of university students. The results show that students using LCA Game performed significantly better on procedural knowledge while students involved in the non-gamified activity performed significantly better on factual knowledge. In addition, while higher levels of usability and enjoyment were associated to the LCA Game group, no particular differences were found on the other motivational dimensions. Thus, this study provides important insights about the specific educational benefits that can be obtained through DGBL in manufacturing education.