This study investigates tourism undergraduates' perceptions of learning engagement and oral communication in English through their experiences of testing a pilot purpose-designed educational digital game. Reflecting the implementation of digitalization strategy in universities of applied sciences in Finland, it examines whether single instances of digital gameplay afford oral communication in the L2. Sociocultural and ecological language learning theories were the framework of the study. The data consist of the teacher researcher's observations of gameplay sessions, learning diaries and preliminary and post-gameplay online questionnaires. The learning diaries and open questionnaire responses were analyzed with qualitative content analysis using the preliminary questionnaire responses for comparison. The results showed that once-off gameplay sessions afforded engagement and oral communication in the L2. However, the questionnaire responses and learning diaries implied that the students had high expectations of learning engagement and oral skills development which were not completely fulfilled due to game design constraints. This suggests that although much occurs during single instances of gameplay, a participatory approach involving education professionals and learners in educational game design is warranted to fully optimize L2 appropriation within the game environment. [For the complete volume, see ED578177.]