Recommended Games and Puzzles for Children

Games

• Blokus - a beautiful game suitable for play, creative artwork, or many pentomino puzzles.  There is a smaller two-player only version called Travel Blokus.  For variations, see the Blokus Wikipedia article.  Blokus pieces are all polyomino pieces for 1-5 squares.  Polyomino puzzles that make use of these pieces can be found in Polyominoes by Solomon Golomb and Polyominoes: A Guide to Puzzles and Problems in Tiling by George Martin.
• Checkers - I use either chunky Crisloid backgammon pieces on a roll-up chess board, or an oversize Cracker Barrel rug-type board with big pieces.  My son's favorite checkers variation is giveaway checkers, where the winner is the first to lose all pieces.  As with the original rules, jumps are required.
• Chinese Checkers (Pavilion wooden set with plastic pegs recommended) - History and variations are described in the Chinese Checkers Wikipedia article.
• Connect Four - classic simple abstract four-in-a-row game.  For older children, I'd also recommend playing five-in-a-row Gomoku on a 9-by-9 Go practice board.  For beginners, Connect Four gently limits considerations to at most 7 moves. 
• Dominoes - regular Cardinal set for both playing and building.  Rules to many domino games can be found online or in the short-but-sweet Great Book of Domino Games by Jennifer A. Kelley.
• Dots and Boxes - an excellent pencil and paper game.  Although this can be played by making a grid of dots on any piece of paper, I like to have graph paper handy and darken existing lines in an outlined rectangular area.  See the Dots and Boxes Wikipedia article or The New Games Treasury by Merilyn Simonds Mohr below.  (For deeper strategy and analysis, see The Dots and Boxes Game: Sophisticated Child's Play by Elwyn R. Berlekamp.) 
• Enchanted Forest - an excellent twist on the memory game genre.  Move about the forest and look under trees to find various fairy tale items the king is requesting at his castle.  This is the only game I know of where you start by shuffling trees.
• Guess Who? - an easy introduction to the deduction game genre.  By asking yes/no questions about appearance, deduce the person the other player holds.  Before introducing this, you can also teach the simpler number guessing game.  Jotto provides a much greater challenge (for vocabulary and deduction) for older children and adults.
• Hex - an outstanding pencil and paper game.  Start with a 3-by-3 board (easy) and scale up over time, introducing Go (or one-capture Go) when your child is older.  In my mind, Hex is what children should learn instead of Tic-Tac-Toe.  The disadvantage of Hex is the relative difficulty in drawing the board, which is made much easier if one draws a triangular grid (with triangle intersections where the hexagon centers would be), and uses two different colored pens (e.g. red/blue) to draw pieces at the grid intersections.  Or, one can print out boards found online.  Of abstract strategy games, Go is one of the very best in the world, and Hex is a very nice simple abstract game with some of the general feel of Go.  (Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections and Connection Games: Variations on a Theme by Cameron Browne allow deeper exploration of Hex and other connection games.)
• Hey! That's My Fish! - a clever but elegantly simple abstract game of penguins racing about a breaking ice floe in pursuit of the most fish.  One can easily handicap this game either by setting aside a set number of fish tiles for the weaker player at the start, or by reducing the number of penguins used by the stronger player.  Allowing varying shape of starting grids and randomized tile layout, this game has good replayability. 
• Jenga - I have a multicolored "Tumbling Towers" budget set by Cardinal.  This is good for both playing and building.
• Junior Labyrinth - an interesting board game in which players dynamically shift columns and rows of a small maze in a quest for treasures and other items.
• Mancala - Cardinal's editions are OK.  For serious players, bigger boards are essential to allow easy counting of pieces, but small hands can enjoy these sets as is, or one can substitute beans smaller than the included glass gems in order to make counting pieces easier. (For history and 100+ variations, see The Complete Mancala Games Book: How to Play the World's Oldest Board Games by Larry Russ.)
• Memory (Ravensburger) - I favor Ravensburger's original edition with 64 thick, sturdy cardboard squares with beautiful illustrations (some intentionally similar) as a memory set for all ages.  Unfortunately, Hasbro has exclusive licensing here, so I was only able to get a classic Ravensburger set through a Finnish relative.
• Pig - For young children who are old enough not to choke on them, use glass gems for points. (I use ~160 cobalt blue gems for 2 players.)  The game ends when the last point is taken.  The person with the most points wins.  The Gettysburg College Bookstore sells specialized Pig dice for playing this game, but a regular die will suffice.  Pig is the folk game ancestor of Pass the Pigs, and there are many variants.
• Sprouts - an excellent pencil and paper game.  See the Sprouts Wikipedia article or The New Games Treasury by Merilyn Simonds Mohr below.  (For deeper analysis, see Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, Vol. 1 by Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy.)
• The New Games Treasury by Merilyn Simonds Mohr - My favorite treasury of 500+ diverse games with good illustrations and interesting historical information

Puzzles

• Jigsaw Puzzles (Ravensburger and FX Schmid are high quality producers.)
• Mazes - Although I link here to freeware, I generate these with a program I wrote, and my son and I work on mazes cooperatively, starting from each exit and seeking to bring our red and blue pens together somewhere in the middle. 
• Metro - for the little train enthusiast.  Older children and train hobbyists may also enjoy train shunting puzzles.
• Rush Hour - for the little car/truck enthusiast.  This and the 15 Puzzle (see related 15 Puzzle book) are good entry points to the broader set of sliding piece puzzles covered in Sliding Piece Puzzles by Edward Hordern.

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last updated 4 July 2007