Preschool and Kindergarten (age 4-6) is a great time to introduce children to tabletop gaming, as most kids posses the attention span and understanding to make it through simple, well-designed games. And it’s a great way to get kids off the screen and engaged with tactile play, learning patience, strategy, and graciousness.
BoardGameGeek is a massive treasure trove of board gaming information, but it can be a little tricky to filter what you’re looking for, especially when it comes to kid-friendly board games.
BGG user Cocoabine has done the filtering for us, creating a Definitive List of Games for various age groups, including preschoolers. There’s classics like Old Maid, Go Fish, and Connect Four, as well as more recent releases, like the kid-friendly version of Quacks of Quedlinburg, Quacks & Co.
The BGG list includes popular family games which have received at least 20 votes, within each recommended age rating. The list isn’t dynamic, however: it’s a snapshot from August 2024.
Still, this is a fantastic resource with dozens of options, many of which you can find at your local Target.
Inspired by that list, we’ve highlighted some of our favorite board games for young kids below.
Dragomino
Kingdomino is already a great game for kids (see below!), and Dragomino is just a bit simpler to hook younger and newer gamers. Plus, dragons! Like Kingdomino, players draft tiles to create a patchwork map. By putting similar pieces together (such as forests), players can take a dragon egg token in the hope of hatching a baby dragon. The player with the most dragon hatchlings by the end of the game wins.
Garden Variety
From Unstable Games, designers of Unstable Unicorns and other fun card-art games, Garden Variety is an adorably fun version of the simplist card game of all, War. Instead of simply playing the highest card, however, players take turns rolling a die to see which card values will win the round. Certain suits beat other suits for tiebreakers, and players can play mischevious gnomes to steal cards and change the rules. A gentle introduction to competitive trick-taking games.
Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters
If the title doesn’t already have you hooked, let me sell you on the gameplay. Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters is a co-op strategy game where players race through a (kid-friendly) haunted house searching for treasure. Every round spawns new ghosts in random rooms, and too many ghosts transforms into a haunting, which requires multiple players to defeat. Grab all the treasures before too many hauntings appear to win.
Note: While the original release is expensive and hard to find, a new Anniversary Edition is launching on December 15, and features an all-new competitive mode with one player controlling the ghosts.
Kingdomino
A colorful twists on dominoes, Kingdomino has players drafting tiles to build their personal map of farms, forests, and swamps. Regions must connect to at least one side (e.g. forest to forest), and players want to make large regions with as many crown icons as possible, multiplying their final score. Players must weigh their draft decisions between valuable tiles, or going earlier in the next draft, and adapt to their growing puzzle-grid as the game progresses.
The Magic Labyrinth
The Magic Labyrinth is the kind of kid’s game you want to show off to other parents, thanks to its ingenious use of hidden magnets. Parents (or older kids) construct a hidden maze beneath the board as part of the setup. The goal is to roll and move your playing piece around a blank board gathering tokens. The twist is that every piece is magentized to a ball beneath the board, which can run into the maze walls, creating the magical invisible wall effect. It’s a clever game of testing memory that anyone can enjoy.
Potion Explosion
In Potion Explosion, players take turns grabbing marbles to complete potions to score points. Younger kids will need help using the magic potion powers (or you can play without them), but anyone can enjoy drafting marbles from the gravity feed, and creating “explosions” with same colors for extra marbles. The tactile gameplay is immediately fun for kids, and matching colors is an easy concept to follow.
Santorini
On the older side of the range (age: 6+) lies Santorini, a deceptively simple strategy game. Using a pair of workers, players take turns moving and constructing a building in an adjacent space on the board. Building pieces are stackable, up to three levels. As soon as anyone reaches a third level, they win. It’s an easy premise, but immediately challenging when facing an opponent trying to do the exact same thing, and competing with limited space. For younger gamers, Santorini is best played without any player powers, but older and experienced gamers can add these variable player powers to spice up the action.
Note: Like Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters above, the original version of Santorini has been discontinued in favor of the new upcoming Pantheon Edition, currently available for pre-order.
Skip-Bo
An absolute classic card game in my household, Skip-Bo has players forming ascending piles of number cards in order to get rid of their own stack of cards. By drawing and playing cards, players work to be the first to deplete their stack. As long as players can count to 12 (and ideally hold a hand of cards) they can play. Skip-Bo is much more user-friendly and less “take-that” than its bigger cousin Uno, despite that game’s persistent popularity.
Sleeping Queens
In Sleeping Queens, players draw and discard cards in the hopes of playing a king, which allows them to draw one of the random face-down Queen cards. The Queens are worth a varying amount of points, and players can fight over them (and protect them) with other special cards. It cleverly encourages some light math by having players form addition equations with three cards in their hand, such as 2-3-5. Discarding three cards at a time is a great way to draw the cards you want. The first player with the most Queens, or the highest Queen points, wins!
Spot It!
The perfect stocking stuffer, Spot it! is nothing more than a series of circular cards with a bunch of symbols. Gameplay is simple: divide the cards between the players, leaving a single one remaining. Then players look for one of the matching symbols to discard their card (alternatively, players can play in reverse, moving to acquire more cards as they match). With eight symbols on each card, there’s always exactly one match for every two cards, making it fun for kids and adults alike.
Sweetlandia
Sweetlandia is a wonderful introduction to auction and bidding games. Players must choose which of their number cards to play to bid for new buildings and areas for their Candyland-like city. They can only use each number once each round, promoting interesting decisions on which cards to prioritize. Do you grab as many Rocky Roads as possible, or try to complete that public goal with a Marshmallow Mountain and Lemonade Lake? A great game that adults can enjoy as well.
