Recommended Games and Puzzles for Children
There are many games and puzzles I've enjoyed playing with my young (3-7
yr. old) children. These are the ones I would most highly recommend (with
a few related recommendations for older children and adults). I've
ordered them alphabetically and
highlighted those I consider most
essential. In all cases, I consider these games to have both (1) relative
simplicity of rules for child accessibility, and (2) the quality and depth of
game play for all ages.Games
- Amazons -
Originally called El
Juego de las Amazonas ("The Game of the Amazons"), this is an excellent
abstract territorial strategy game with very simple rules, yet lots of depth to
grow in interest as one grows. As of this writing, only a paper grid
version can be easily purchased from
Kadon. However,
one can play a smaller variation with a Chess set and Poker chips as follows:
Use pawns for Amazon pieces and Poker chips to mark squares with arrows.
Place white pawns at A3, C1, F1, and H3 of the chessboard. Place black
pawns at A6, C8, F8, and H6. Beyond the setup, rules follow as in the
Wikipedia article.
This
presentation compares Amazons and
Hey! That's My Fish! (described below), and introduces my variation, Amazon
Penguins, combining the two.
-
Blokus - a beautiful game suitable for play, creative artwork, or
many pentomino puzzles. There is a smaller two-player only version called
Travel Blokus. (Amazon.com
link) 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.
(Amazon.com
link)
-
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. (Amazon.com
link)
-
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. (Amazon.com
link)
-
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. (See Amazons
above.) This
presentation compares Amazons and
Hey! That's My Fish!, and describe how to play the game cheaply using Poker
chips and pawns ("Mr. Pauper's Penguins"). (Amazon.com
link) Also, I've developed a pencil-and-paper adaptation called
Paper Pen-guins.
-
Jenga - I have a multicolored
"Tumbling Towers" budget set by Cardinal. This is good for both playing
and building. (Amazon.com
link)
-
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. (Amazon.com
link)
-
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. (Amazon.com
link)
-
Pig - For young
children who are old enough not to choke on them, use glass gems for points. (I
use 161 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. Although out of
print, it is still relatively easy to purchase a used copy.
Puzzles
Sources
last updated 28 October 2009
