Several clients and readers know my love of board games, so I periodically receive requests for recommendations. This article is a bundle of the replies I’ve given to those requests over the years.

Adult Games You Can Play With Toddlers / Young Children

I will start by saying that I don’t inherently enjoy the stereotypical child’s board game. Most of the officially toddler appropriate games are like Candyland: Luck determines your fate and you simply pass the half hour going on the journey. While my husband has done most of the time playing these games, I have found they can be made more fun for the adult (and sometimes the child too) with a bout of pretend. For example, inventing a Candyland character who changes their overall mood based on the current color they are standing on. These role-playing distractions keep the game interesting for all involved.

Even though I dislike games of random chance, my whole family and I love board games. We love them so much we could not wait until the 8+ on the box to introduce my daughter to them. My daughter mastered reading early, so your mileage on playing these at age 2 may vary. But each of these games are very enjoyable for adults even if there is an agent of toddler chaos on the field. So long as all the cards and pieces stay out of the mouth, these games have a chance to be a joy at your table.

Love Letter

Love Letter is hands down the easiest game for kids to play successfully while also being fun for adults. It has a simple mechanic: You have one card in your hand. On your turn, you draw one card and then pick one card to play. For children, we boil this down to the reminder “One to Play; One to Keep.” No matter which card is selected to play, something happens. This makes there almost no wrong answer. (“Don’t play the Princess!” is the other rule the child needs to remember.) We love it. The base game plays up to four players while the premium version can play up to eight. Both are easily played by younger players.

Castle Panic

While I am at work, my husband and daughter regularly and successfully played the cooperative tower-defense board game Castle Panic. Because it is cooperative, the adult can help the child with the strategy of their turn. The mechanic requires identifying which colored arc and labelled ring monsters are in, which is quite a fun game in and of itself for toddlers.

Tokaido

My favorite game to play when my daughter was young was Tokaido. It is a calm game where you journey across Japan gathering cultural experiences. We play a low-stress version of the game where I offer her the next places she could go as a question (“Do you want to take a bath or paint a painting?”) and she picks. For adult enjoyment, it is best played with one toddler and two adults. However, my daughter loves playing a two-player version. With only two players, there is little strategy so the enjoyment comes completely from getting to see the cards and tell a story about what your journey is like, which admittedly is quite fun.

Sushi Go

Another game we all love is Sushi Go. It is a pass-and-play game (you pick one card from your current hand to play and then pass the remainder of the hand to the next person). You can always play any card in your hand, making it easy for toddlers to play. We used to regularly host a game night at our house of 7 adults and my toddler. Sushi Go can play 8 people and the addition of one toddler who is picking random cards easily makes the game more fun for the strategizing adults. The theme of the game is that you are eating the menu items that you pick to play. This adds another element of fun to the toddler game as you can act out and pretend that you (or a doll or animal friends) are eating the played cards.

Adult Games You Can Play With Children / Big Kids

This next set of games includes several that we played before age 6, but we found our daughter enjoyed them more when she was older. The intricacies of the game can be lost on a 4-year-old.

Forbidden Island

Matt Leacock, the creator of Pandemic, has a whole series of games featuring the same game cooperative mechanics of a threat deck and meter which present opposition to your collective goal of acquiring items through a player’s hand of matching cards. His series of family friendly cooperative kids games — Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, and Forbidden Sky — use this mechanic and are very accessible to younger kids. Forbidden Island is the easiest mechanic, Forbidden Desert is the most fun, and Forbidden Sky has the appeal of letting you build a real electrical circuit. Forbidden Jungle is also in this series but not as much fun as the first three.

Rat-a-Tat-Cat

We’ve had a lot of fun playing Rat-a-Tat-Cat. It’s “younger player” variant rules are perfect for those who are just learning their numbers. The goal of the game is to have the lowest numbers at the end. The gimmick is that you cannot see what the other player’s cards are and the game continues until someone ends it. This combines a memory game with odds guessing.

Disney Villainous

My daughter and I fell in love with Disney Villainous. Its color-coded words and clear symbols make it accessible to pre- and early readers, but the joy of the game for adults starts after the child is old enough to pay attention all the way through an hour long game. The various characters and their goals keep the game fresh on replay. With the exception of the Queen of Hearts who is extremely difficult to play, the base game characters are very accessible with King John being the easiest character for young players.

Wingspan

I would also highly recommend the game Wingspan. It can be played either strategically or impulsively, which makes it an ideal game for when only some players are in the mood for strategy. Importantly, it is also a game which is as equally fun to lose as it is to win.

Codenames

The game Codenames is especially fun with 4 players (two teams of two) and especially fun when everyone knows one another well. We personally enjoy the Disney edition of the game best. (We also have the Marvel edition but find it more challenging.) My out-of-town family and I have also been known to photograph a game set up and then play over email or text.

Boggle

For word games, Boggle is a nice way to give a linguist a challenge. It combines both the skills of a large vocabulary and spatial reasoning, which can sometimes even the playing field if those skills are spread out among the players. In my family, my crossword puzzler husband is typically victorious, but the rest of us have a good time.

Ghooost!

Ghooost! is a faultless game which I am sad to say appears to be largely out of print. I often describe it as Uno except every problem with Uno is fixed. My husband and I got this shortly after our marriage and have played it daily or weekly since. Our cards, the featured photo of this article, are worn and aged. We did play this game with my daughter at younger ages but now that she’s older we are all having fun.

Several games by Czech Games Edition

Before having children, one of my favorite games was Alchemists by Czech Games Edition. At its core, it is a game of logical deduction which is elevated even higher by its hilarious theme and silly rule book. For the same vibe but an entirely different mechanic, Dungeon Petz is both whimsical and extremely challenging. Both require a long attention span and are most enjoyable when all the parties playing are curious rather than competitive.

Magical Kitties Saves the Day

Magical Kitties Save the Day is a tabletop role playing game, meaning there is no “winning” or “losing.” Instead, you simply use the mechanics to play pretend together. Unlike more traditional RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, Magical Kitties Save the Day requires very little from the GM storyteller role. The storyteller only receives the ability to perform actions if the players have attempted to do something and suffered a consequence. If they succeed (determined by their dice role), then everything works exactly as they intended. Magical Kitties works really well with young players, who are already inclined to invent entire made-up realities, and is the most fun when all players intend to be swept up into the alternate reality.

Happy gaming!

Photo by author, Megan Russell, of her board game collection.