My own children are now five, eight and ten so it's not always a quiet or even peaceful affair. Everyone who has kids knows what I'm talking about and some of you might even be asking why I bother. Why not feed the kids early, put them to bed then enjoy a quiet dinner with my partner. The simple answer is because it's important to me to spend that time together as a family.
Most Friday nights we, as a family, also try to play a game together after dinner and board games are our favourites. Here are 8 must have family board games to play with your family.
Sometimes it's a drawing game, sometimes it's charades but more often it's a board or card game. These games are great for developing short term memory skills, building spatial awareness, sportsmanship, turn taking and other social skills, early maths skills (like counting, 1 to 1 correspondence, doubles and simple addition) fine motor strengthening, colour recognition, reasoning and strategy.
Because we have a mix of ages playing I thought I share some of our favourites that both the youngest and the oldest amongst us still enjoy playing.
Sleeping Queens
Pros: You never have more than five cards at once making it perfect for small hands. There's also enough luck required to make this challenging for older player which evens the playing field.
Cons: You might need to buy a second pack once this one wears out
Spot it!
Another card game we love is (affiliate link)Spot It
Pros: great for visual learners and small hands. You can play this by yourself or with plenty of others. It's handy size makes it perfect to travel with.
Cons: if you have someone who is quicker at finding their match, it can become frustrating for the others.
Suspend
Suspend
(affiliate link) is our favourite game from two Christmases ago (you can see a pattern forming). Everyone was playing this game, everyone!
It's an easy to play game. Each player gets single rod of every colour to begin. You take turns rolling a coloured dice to determine which rod you need to try and balance with the others. If you don't have that colour as you go along you can take another player's. Seems simple enough? If you knock any off, they all become yours.Pros: great for fine motor control, reasoning, predicting and colour recognition
Cons: there's only one dice so don't lose it like I did taking it to class one day
Doodle Dice
Another Christmas game from a few years back, (affiliate link) Doodle Dice
Each player is allowed to roll the dice three times, after each roll you can reserve the dice you want to try and match to a picture on the cards displayed in the middle. You need to collect one card of each colour to finish. As you can see from the picture, to collect the orange cards, you only need to make a picture using one dice but the purple one requires all six dice. This is were the strategy comes in - you're better off trying to get the purple card with each roll and then by the third roll, if you still haven't been successful, you might still be able to make one of the other pictures.
Pros: good for colour recognition, spatial awareness (rotating) and one to one correspondence. I also like how it encourages children to see things from less obvious sources. Can be played by two people or more.
Cons: Can take a while to collect all six cards if you are relying just on luck.
UNO Attack
I probably don't need to say much about the card game UNO but we sometimes like playing (affiliate link)Uno Attack
Pros: unpredictable making it fun
Cons: needs batteries and little hands can end up with a lot of cards
Q-bitz
This is one of the games we got last Christmas (affiliate link)MindWare Q-bitz
Pros: Great for spatial awareness. Can be simplified for younger players (choose easier cards) or made harder for adults (you have to memorise the card and then match it)
Cons: only four people can play and the pieces are quite small making it more difficult to manoeuvre if you have larger fingers.
Blokus
Blokus(affiliate link)
Pros: everything about this game. It's quick to play, easy to set up. It's great for spatial awareness, planning and building strategy.
Cons: better/harder with four players but only has a maximum of four players meaning one of us has to pair up
You probably have noticed that I haven't included any board games that require players to count on to move their piece - games like Monopoly, Trouble, Snakes and Ladders. We do play those games too and enjoy them greatly. As a teacher in a classroom with children beginning to count, you can easily identify children who have played board games at home as they know how to count on without starting on the spot they're on (it's a skill disappearing from classrooms) so I would continue to encourage you to play those sort of board games too but today I thought I share some of our new favourites.
What are your favourite board games to play as a family?