Introduction: The aim of this study was to provide guidelines to help professionals make decisions regarding the types of emotions produced by different sporting games classified into four domains of motor action (psychomotor, co-operation, opposition and cooperation/opposition). Method: The sample comprised 284 first-year university students of physical education and primary education (INEFC, Faculty of Educaction, universities of Lleida and Barcelona, Spain) aged between. Through a quasi-experimental design the students indicated, on a valided questionnaire, the intensity felt for thirteen emotions after play games. A classification tree was generated in order to analyse the data. Results: Comparison of different motor action domains showed that cooperative games were the most likely to elicit intense positive emotions among students. In non-competitive cooperation games, scores for positive emotions were 18.3% higher than those reported for competitive games. Conclusions and Conclusions: The findings suggested that the type of games chosen is the first important decision to make in terms of educating students' emotions. Each domain of motor action is associated with the production of certain types of emotion. (Contains 3 figures.)