More than 10% of children in the age range 711 turn out to be poor text comprehenders: they have difficulties in reasoning about events of a story. TERENCE is the first adaptive learning system with stories and companion smart games, for reasoning about stories,and developed for primary-school poor comprehenders. The development of TERENCE followed both the user-centred and the evidence-based design methodologies, by placing users at the centre of the development process and by choosing a design because of evidence of its effectiveness for the users. This paper presents the TERENCE smart games: it explains how such methodologies were used for iteratively designing and evaluating incrementally improved versions of the TERENCE smart games. ; none