With everyone having already spent so much time together this year, your family may be looking for some screen-free things to do as a family. Family games night are a great way for families to come together for a common goal and if your family is like mine– to compete. Board games also have the added bonus of boosting kids spatial reasoning ability!
We are a family that loves to play games. Although I have written about the 10 Best Party Games. Here are some of our favorite board games you will want to add to your collection. They are great for cold winter nights or lazy summer days at the cottage.
We’ll start with some classic games.
Uno
Time to Play: 20-30 minutes
Number of Players: 2–10
Minimum Age: 3-year-olds can match colors, shapes, and numbers, but it really gets more fun for kids aged 6 and up
Get It: Uno
This classic game is fun for all ages for a reason. It’s FUN! Littler kids may need some help understanding the special cards, but they will get the hang of it quickly. Basically, it’s a card game where you lay down number cards so that their number or color matches with the card played before you. It’s gets interesting when you throw in the special cards to mess with your opponents.
Skip-Bo
Time to Play: 15-20 minutes
Number of Players: 2-6
Minimum Age: best for ages 6 and up
Get It: Skip-Bo or Skip-Bo Junior
This is a fun and fast-paced card game that is easy for all ages. If you are worried your younger kids won’t get the game, you can also get SKIP-Bo Junior. You are given a stack of cards and the first person to get rid of their stack wins. You layout cards by making piles of numbers from 1-12 (or 1-10 for Skip-Bo Junior). Like Uno, this game-winner is based more on luck, which makes it a great balanced game for the whole family.
Ticket to Ride
Time to Play: 30-60 minutes
Number of Players: 2–5
Minimum Age: best for ages 8 and up
Get It: Ticket to Ride or Ticket to Ride First Journey (Kids version) or Ticket to Ride Europe or Ticket to Ride London or Ticket to Ride New York 1960
For any family who loves to travel and enjoys strategy games, this is FOR YOU! Your goal is to pick some routes to travel across the continent. You learn strategy, geography, and kids love trying to block their parent’s routes! My husband and I started playing this game and the kids saw us having so much fun they wanted to join, now they won’t let us play it without him. One o the great things about this game is that every time you pick different routes, so it’s an entirely different game.
This game is so popular there are a bunch of different versions, including Europe, for kids, London, Rails & Sails, New York City, and more.
Qwirkle
Time to Play: 30-45 minutes
Number of Players: 2–4
Minimum Age: Some 4-year-olds can play this with help; best for ages 5 and up
Get It: Qwirkle or Travel Qwirkle
This game is challenging for adults but easy enough kids can play too. The short time of 30-45 minutes makes it great timing for family, short enough for youngers to be engaged and long enough you spend quality time.
If your kids aren’t used to strategy games it may take a bit of time for them to get used to playing. There are no characters or plots, the game is similar to dominoes where you build rows or columns that are the same color or shape without any pattern repeating. If you get the max of six rows in a tile you get a ‘qwirkle’ and extra points!
One of the added benefits of this game is they have a travel version which comes in a small black bag making it easy to play anywhere.
Catan
Time to Play: 60+ minutes
Number of Players: 3-4
Minimum Age: 8 and up
Get It: Catan or Catan Compact Travel version
This is a newer game for our family. We bought it for our 13-year-old son who loves chess and video games like Clash of Clans. The game is challenging enough that parents don’t get bored, but kids can get it figured out easily.
Catan (previously known as Settlers of Catan) is a multiplayer game where you put yourself in the era of discovery. After a long voyage and deprivation, your ships reach the coast of an uncharted island where you must race to settle the island before others do.
Photo credit: https://www.catan.com/
Dominoes
Time to Play: 30 minutes
Number of Players: 2–10
Minimum Age: Ages 5 and up
Get It: Dominoes or Dominoes Travel Version
This is one of our favorites. We love the Mexican Train dominoes version. Each family makes their longest ‘train’ of dominoes and takes turns adding to their line or the open one. The goal is to be the first player to lay down all of your dominoes and whatever tiles you have left if another player goes out, count against you.
If you do have this game, we highly suggest getting the dominoes tile racks that help A LOT when you have a ton of tiles.
Sequence
Time to Play: 10-30 minutes
Number of Players: 2-12 players (best played with 3-4 players)
Minimum Age: Best for ages 7 and up
Get It: Sequence
In this game one player tried to score two SEQUENCES (a connected series of 5 of same color markers in a straight line). Although you can play 2 to 12 players, if you are playing more than three players, you should play in teams. You place your markers on the board, which is covered with the various cards from a deck of playing cards.
Yahtzee
Time to Play: 30 minutes
Number of Players: 2-10 players
Minimum Age: Best for ages 6 and up
Get It: Yahtzee
This classic dice game is one that is great for kids, parents and grandparents. My kids LOVE playing this with their grandparents and the grandparents love that a game from when they were kids is still fun. There is strategy involved, but it’s simple enough young’s kids can get into it. And besides all that, it’s fun to throw the dice and add up the totals – kids end up doing math without even knowing it.
Blokus
Time to Play: 20-30 minutes
Number of Players: 2- 4 players
Minimum Age: Age 5 and up
Get It: Blokus
This game is based on laying different colored game tiles on the board. You need to make sure it touches one of the corners of a tile you’ve already placed. This one requires strategy to get all the tiles of your color out first. If you want to make it a bit more difficult for 2 players, each player can play 2 colors. Like most of the strategy games there is a lot more luck involved but it’s also great that it is a simple game that young children can learn quickly, and yet the strategy needed to get better can make it more difficult. One of the great things is that if you are of a certain age you can relive your love of Tetris.
Rummikub
(or what we call Rummy)
Time to Play: 45-60 minutes
Number of Players: 2–4
Minimum Age: Like most strategy games, better for 5-year-old and up
Get It: Rummikub
This is by far one of our most played games. Again, it’s based on luck because you draw tiles from a bag without knowing what you will get. You lay out tiles so they are in numerical order or are matched numbers. The fact that you need 30 points to ‘open’ and lay your tiles down will help your kids with math. There is a good bit of strategy and creativity involved in Rummikub as you shift around tiles to play the tiles on your turn. It’s funny, but try not to forget where the tiles go if your idea doesn’t work out so you can put them back as they were.
This is another one that is great for young kids and fun for parents and grandparents to play. Growing up we played this game with playing cards, it wasn’t until I had kids later that I realized there was even a tile game to play. But now that we have the tile game, WE LOVE IT.
Otrio
Time to Play: 20-30 minutes
Number of Players: 2-4 players
Minimum Age: Best for ages 6 and up
Get It: Otrio or Otrio travel version
If your kids can play tic-tac-toe they can play Otrio. It’s like a modern day version of the game where you try to get three of the same sized pieces in a row, three of the same colors in ascending or descending order; or three concentric pieces of the same color in the same space.
As a bonus, you can also try out Quarto.
Quarto
Time to Play: 15 minutes
Number of Players: 2 players
Minimum Age: Best for ages 8 and up
Get It: Quarto
If you like Otrio you will want to try Quarto which is similar. Quarto is a strategy game where your goal is to get 4 pieces of same color, height, shape or hollow/empty pieces in a row. This is a quick game and fun to play while waiting for dinner or don’t have a lot of time.
If your kids aren’t into board games, why not try some brain game books.
Do you have favorite family games we don’t have listed? Let us know in the comments below.
