Croatian language is the most extensive and the most relevant school subject in primary education. Croatian language classes are the most closely connected with all other school subjects because they are all taught in the Croatian language. Therefore, within these lessons students need to gain competences needed in various communicative situations. The acquisition of the basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing facilitates the acquisition of language contents. Reading is a complex skill which implies the reception of written information. One of the preconditions of reading are prereading skills, which children develop before starting primary school. The level of the development of reading skills has been regularly tested by PIRLS (2011) and PISA (2015) studies. The purpose of reading skills is comprehension, which can be positively impacted by language games because their use may increase motivation and activity. For the purpose of this paper, research was conducted in four primary schools (Petrinja, Zagreb, Veliki Grđevac and Sveti Ivan Zelina) in collaboration with primary school class teachers, university professors, and third and fourth grade pupils. This research included 227 pupils, and the aim of the research was to test the pupils' reading competences, to ascertain what influence language games have on the reading competences of pupils in lower grades of primary school, and to investigate whether there is difference in the results considering class, sex, place of living and their grade in Croatian language. During their Croatian language classes students played language games and read a text which was followed by a reading comprehension test whose objective was to show how well they had understood the text. The results showed that language games have positive influence on the development of reading competences, there was no difference in the results considering age and sex, but there were differences considering the place of living.