Our Favorite (and Not So Favorite) Board Games With Young 3-6 Year-Old Kids
If you know us, you know we LOVE board games and our collection is embarrassingly large. Why is it embarrassingly large? It’s because we like to play a different kind of board game after dinner than on a game night, we like different types of games with my family than with Nate’s family, we love researching new games, and we get bored playing the same games over and over. We think board games are a great way to strengthen relationships and make memories with people!
There are also tons of benefits of playing board games with kids. They can help kids gain skills like following rules, waiting, taking turns, memory, problem-solving, decision-making, deferring gratification, and dealing with mistakes/losing.
So naturally, when we had Oak we went on a quest to find games that we could play with him! We started playing games with Oak when he was about 2 and a half. We found that a lot of the “children’s games” were so simple that they were boring for us adults to play. We also found that we could often include him in games that aren’t recommended for players that young as long, and as they had a bit of luck Oak would still sometimes win at these games.
So here’s our round-up of some of our favorite board games for kids:
1. Can’t Stop $39
1-4 players. 30 min. This is one of our favorite games with Oak. It’s a push-your-luck game where you are racing to be the first player to advance their marker across the board. Oak has fun deciding whether or not to keep rolling or stop.
2. Loose Caboose $17
2-4 players. 15 min. Lay cards to create a track, but don’t fall off the end! What a fun simple game this one is!
3. Butterfly $30
2-5 players. 45 min. Oak loves moving the cute little hedgehog around and deciding which tiles to collect. It’s super easy to learn and fun to play.
4. Junk Art $49
2-6 players. 30 min. Use a collection of oddly shaped pieces to create silly structures and complete mini challenges. Whether we are trying to have the last tower standing, be the fastest to stack our pieces, or create the tallest tower, this game is always fun!
5. Yeti in my Spaghetti $9
2+ players. 5 min. Carefully remove the noodles without letting the yeti fall into the bowl. Kind of like Jenga, but with noodles.
6. Men at Work $39
2-5 players. 45 min. Carefully stack beams, men, bricks, and sticks without knocking anything over.
7. Zombie Dice $29
2+ players. 20 min. Try to roll brains without rolling shotguns. A push your luck game.
8. Bears and Bees $17
2-5 players. 30 min. Be the first to get rid of all your tiles by placing them in the hive. It’s like a combination of uno and dominos with 6-sided tiles.
9. Charades for Kids $7
3+ players. 5 minutes. No reading is required for this fun version of charades and Oak loves trying to get us to guess the picture.
10. Point Salad $17
2-6 players. 30 min. Oak doesn’t always understand the strategy behind this game, but we all have fun collecting veggies to score the highest points.
11. Tenzi $38
2+ players. 5 min. Each player has ten dice and is racing to be the first to complete the objective on the card. The objective might be to roll all evens or create a pattern with your dice. Occasionally we do skip a card to make it playable with Oak.
12. Dixit $34
3-8 players. 30 min. Dixit is kind of like Apples to Apples, but WAY better. Someone chooses a card and gives a hint about that card and everyone else has to choose a card to match the hint. Then everyone guesses which card was the original hint giver’s! We aren’t normally fans of party games, but this one is so fun.
13. Planet $33
2-4 players. 45 min. So fun for Oak because he is sticking tiles to a 3D world to try to get points. He is still learning strategy for this game, but we play variations where we hide more of the objective cards to make it a bit more random for him.
14. Hues and Cues $21
3-10 players. 30 min. A fun game for learning colors. On your turn you give clues to try to get everyone to guess the color you are thinking of like “grapes”.
15. Tetris $18
2-4 players. 30 min. Players place tetris tiles into their play area to try to score the most points. I wouldn’t say Oak is competative in this game at all. But Nate and I have a fun time playing the game and Oak has fun dropping the tiles into his board and learning spacial awareness.
16. Monkey Around $22
2+ players. 5 min. This isn’t your traditional board game. Each card has different movement challenges, like carrying the banana on your head or hopping on one foot, but Oak and I have a blast doing the challenges together!
17. I Spy Dig In $15
2-4 players. 10 min. Who wouldn’t love running their hands through a big bowl of plastic pieces? It’s fun to search as fast as you can for the items on your card and be the first to find them all.
18. Team 3 $20
3-6 players. 30 min. The goal is to build a structure that matches the card. The twist is that one player on your team can see the card, but can’t speak. One person can speak, but can’t see the card. And one person can build the structure but can’t see the card. You must work together to be the fastest team to build the card! And when we’re not playing Oak likes to play with the blocks.
19. Spot It $10
2-8 players. 15 min. There’s like a billion different editions of Spot It. We really like the camping edition, but they are all great. Oak has gotten really fast at this game and now officially beat me.
20. Moon Balance Game $12
1-4 players. 5 min. It’s fun to balance the cylinders on the moon. Oak also likes to sort them by color or size and build towers with them.
21. Outfoxed $18
2-4 players. 20 min. A cooperative game where you are trying to figure out which fox committed the crime using the clues. Kind of like a more kid-friendly version of Clue.
22. Story Cubes $14
1+ players. 10 min. Oak is really into telling stories and this is just one of the ways we are having fun doing it. Roll the dice and tell a story using the picture on the cubes. That’s it! It’s fun to hear the silly things we come up with.
23. Blokus $22
2-4 players. 30 min. Lay as many pieces as you can touching a corner of the same color. The strategy aspect of this game is a bit beyond Oak still, but he has fun laying the tiles.
24. Camel Up $32
2-8 players. 30 min. You are betting on racing camels as you roll dice to move them around the board. It’s great for helping kids learn about probability and so fun to root for camels as they race around the board!
Our Not-So-Favorites
As we’ve experiemented with games, there’s some that we’ve tried and wouldn’t recommend. Oak still loves playing most of these, but Nate and I find ourselves not wanting to play them. So here they are:
Don’t Break the Ice - Take turns tapping out the ice cubes without letting the penguin fall. The problem with this game is that we spend more time setting the game up than actually playing it! It’s takes like 2 minutes to put all the ice cubes in (which sometimes requires crawling around on the floor and peering under couches) and 10 seconds for a kid to band out all of the pieces.
Bugs in the Kitchen - This game features a battery-operated nano bug that you trap and untrap to move around the board. We really liked the idea of this game, but it just ends too quickly and seems a bit too easy. We thought it might be more fun if you had more nano bugs.
Piece of Pie - In this game players take slices of pie to build a pie in front of them. We didn’t feel like there were enough different ways to win so it felt like everyone was fighting for the same pieces.
The Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Game - Take turns spinning to find out what color acorn you get and then match it to the color on your tree trunk using the squirrel tweezers. This game cost $23, and feel like it got boring way too fast. For a learning activity, it was kind of fun, but it didn’t feel very board-gamey for a board game.
Don’t Rock My Boat - This game looks so cute. It features a bunch of pirate penguins and a boat. We were super excited about this game, but it seems a bit too tricky for Oak, so the games are super short. When Oak gets tired of it breaking, he starts tipping the ship and ruining the game on purpose which is annoying.
My Little Sythe - This game takes some setup up and it feels like the ways to win aren’t evenly weighted. Takes some setup. Too fast/easy to win. Not enough even ways to win and too much strategy. Oak can never win.
Happy Salmon - This game is boring.
Sleeping Queens - This game is a bit too random and doesn’t have enough strategy.
