Playing Board Games With Kids

Depending on how old your kids are, board games can be a lot of fun for the family. They can also be a lot of work if your kids are still really young, and have a hard time understanding or following the rules. Regardless of their age though, helping kids to follow rules to reach a goal is a great way to teach them.

If you’ve never played board games with your children before, you’ll want to start with something that is simple, and doesn’t have a lot of crazy rules involved with it. Starting out with something like Snakes and Ladders, or a basic card game is probably your best option. One of our favorite games that we started with was Uno. You want to choose a game that doesn’t have too many rules, but that will allow your kids to learn some basic rules.

If you have more than one child, and your younger kids are too young to actually play, it may be worth having them play with you so that they can start learning how to cooperate and play as well. This will be more work than not having them play, but there’s a good chance they’re going to be in all of the game parts anyways, so probably best to get them involved in the game action. For example, when playing Uno, we actually give our youngest a few cards to make him feel like he’s playing with us.

There are a lot of game options for kids, and most adults will enjoy them to a degree, as long as you don’t have to play them a million times. I’m pretty sick of Candy Land for example. However, the goal here is to help your kids to learn rules, how to take turns, and that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

Beyond the basic games, there are so many options for games. We’ve found that our kids really enjoy playing the following games:

• Sushi Go! - A card game where you’re building sushi to earn points.
• Outfoxed! - A collaborative game where everyone is on the same team. You’re trying to win together.
• Sequence for kids - a simple board game where you’re trying to get four cards/animals in a row.

We have several other games that we love to play as well, and these are just a few of the many that we play on a regular basis. Outfoxed! is by our favorite of the bunch - it’s a game kind of like Clue, except you’re working together to solve the mystery. Our kids love it, and both my wife and I enjoy playing it as well. We let our toddler roll the dice and help out as well, as long as we’re watching after him.

As your kids continue to grow, continue to look for additional board games that they might enjoy. We have a few different games in our closet that we’ve tried in the past, but are a bit too much for the kids to date. We’re excited to introduce them to some more advanced games with more rules though once they’re ready.

By starting children at a young age playing board games, it will be much easier for them to learn more complex games later. They’ll understand game play in general, and they’ll understand the competition part of games as well.