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With the growing prevalence of mobile apps for self-directed learning, educational games increasingly find their place in everyday routines, becoming accessible to a broad audience. Despite the growing ease of content creation by artificial intelligence computing, the challenge of designing effective and engaging Serious Games remains, particularly in managing cognitive resources and ensuring quality engagement, notably influenced by the game's interaction modalities. This study explores these challenges within the context of a casual mobile mental arithmetic game, investigating the differential impacts of tap and swipe interaction variants on cognitive load and reward-based engagement. The study presents the findings of an international field study on Google Play. In a between-group design, the two casual interaction paradigms were compared regarding their impact on practice performance, cognitive load and effect on classic casual game rewarding represented through points, leaderboards and badges. The findings show that tap interaction can optimise cognitive load with a better mental math practice performance than the more indirect swipe gesture. A combination of elementary tap interaction with point rank and interaction precision badges indicates to enhance practice motivation. The results are synthesised into interaction design recommendations for casual mental math mobile games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]