The Best Board Games for Kids, According to Experts

Ticket to Ride is an adventure-style game in which players attempt to cross the country and connect cities by building train routes. Suitable for ages 8 and up, it is easy to pick up “but also offers a level of strategy and tactics just deep enough for competitive gamers to return to time and again,” says Ian Ross, who runs the popular Instagram page Board Games As Art.

For a lightning-quick, pick-and-pass-style card game, Lauren Bilanko, a co-owner of Twenty Sided Store, suggests Sushi Go!, which she says is very easy to learn but still fun enough to play over and over again. The gameplay is simple: collect cards to create collections of dishes for different point values, and whoever scores the most points wins.

Illustrator Stephen Walsh told us about this “really sweet” game about competitive panda husbandry that’s a favorite of his kids. It asks players to cultivate land plots and grow three species of bamboo for pandas. Walsh describes it as the “perfect Christmas Day game” to break out when you want something family-friendly and cheerful. The game takes about 45 minutes to play and is suitable for ages 8 and up.

Most ’90s kids will remember this classic, which is suitable for children ages 4 and up and can accommodate two to four players. “Nothing could beat being a kid and unboxing this game to build a wacky Rube Goldberg machine,” says board-game designer Rob Sparks.

In our roundup of the best board games to break out during parties, five of our experts praised Just One. “Hands down, Just One is our favorite new party game,” says Kelsey Demers, who runs the board-game blog the Tabletop Family. “It’s simple to play, a breeze to teach, and utterly addictive.” The game won the prestigious 2019 Spiel des Jahres, or German Game of the Year, which evaluates board games based on their game concept, rule structure, layout, and design. The main objective, as the title suggests, is for players to help their teammates guess a word by suggesting “just one” word as a hint. Which sounds easy enough, but, as Matthews warns, “Watch out, duplicate words cancel each other out,” so you need to be creative. A right answer scores your team one point, while a wrong answer docks two points, with the ultimate goal being to get as many points out of 13 as possible. This game takes about 20 minutes to play and is suitable for up to seven players.

Walsh describes Dixit as “a great icebreaker of a game, fantastic for getting everyone interacting.” Great for kids with strong imaginations, it begins with one player being designated the storyteller; that player makes up a sentence based on the image on one of the cards in their hand. Then each player selects the card in their hand that best matches the sentence and gives it to the storyteller. The storyteller shuffles the cards and presents them to the other players, who place bets on which is the original card with the winners gaining points for correct guesses. As an added bonus, “the card artwork is beautiful, imaginative, and sometimes a little surreal,” Walsh says.

“Outfoxed has more replay value than I have ever experienced in a child’s board game,” says John. For months after first getting the game, his then-5-and-a-half-year-old requested a round nearly every single day, he adds. A classic whodunit, the game’s kids discover a series of clues and a group of suspects, zeroing in on the guilty fox through a process of elimination.

Similar to Mousetrap, Operation was beloved by ’90s kids. Walsh told us that while he loved this game when he was young, he also enjoyed playing it when he was older with his friends after a night out. The whole family can sit down and operate on Cavity Sam to remove his various ailments — including his wishbone, charley horse, and Adam’s apple — without setting off the buzzer.

For kids who love to build things, this game asks players to build a shifting tower by adding pieces. The game can accommodate up to four players, which encourages socialization and “very important” peer interaction, explains child therapist Glenda Stoller, co-founder of Village Parenting NYC.

Colleen Russo Johnson, a children’s-tech and media expert, recommends this remix of the original Connect 4 game, which requires a bit more strategy. In addition to placing their pieces in a slot, players must spin the corresponding column, which keeps gameplay interesting.

“I was really surprised at how it held up,” says clinical child psychologist George Sachs. Fourth-grade teacher Courtney Caulfield adds that the kids in her class also love the throwback. “They like it because they can play with friends,” she says. “And it usually makes them think.”

According to Strategist contributor and dad David Pogue, “this is the greatest game” that all ages can play. The rules of this spy-themed favorite are very similar to the basic elements of charades, with players dividing into two teams with one designated spymaster, who provides clues. By guessing the words correctly, players unveil the other teams’ agents. The first to unmask all of its opponents’ spies wins. Pogue calls it “truly hilarious and satisfying,” and though the designer has it labeled for kids 10 and up, Pogue notes that “Codenames is super-fun with younger kids because they make fantastically imaginative connections between the words.”

This edition of Monopoly is designed for cheaters: The goal is to see how many rules you can bend or break in order to win. “Isn’t that the way every kid plays all the time anyway?” says Zibby Owens, mother of four and host of Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. The game “encourages secret bank thefts, secret property swipes, and serious consequences if caught,” Owens adds.

This farm-animal-themed board game “challenges kids to really think about each move,” says NAPPA Awards director Elena Epstein. The game’s main objective had kids create a layout for a series of cows, pigs, and other farm animals that must be kept separated using a limited number of fences, which tests a child’s logic, spatial reasoning, and planning skills. “Kids feel a lot of pride as they figure out each level,” Epstein says.

This 3-D Tetris game, recommended by Ali Mierzejewski, the editor-in-chief of the Toy Insider, works much like the original version of the game except you’re competing against other players using one pot of physical pieces. “You have to be strategic about what pieces you need and try to predict what the other players will need while playing. It’s a really fun way to update the classic video game,” she says.

A tried-and-true for a reason, Yahtzee is “easy to teach, with minimal setup, and suitable for any number of players,” says Sparks. “This absolute classic will have players pushing their luck to roll high-scoring combinations of dice.” Most important, Yahtzee is fast-paced, so it will keep kids engaged throughout the gameplay.

If you’re struggling to find games for very little kids, try Monkey Around. “It’s like Twister for toddlers,” explains Holly Magelof, toy buyer for the Dolphin Bookshop, which she says is very popular among the toddler set. “You see the kids wiggling and giggling — it’s consistently a best seller.”

Spot It! is a matching card game in which kids try to find two identical images between two cards first. Since it’s small enough to fit in your hand, it’s a great game to keep in your purse for doctors’ waiting rooms or long car rides. This one is animal-themed, but the game comes in a bunch of different variations, including favorite IP like Frozen and Paw Patrol.

If your kids are bored of Pictionary, Quintin Smith, editor of the game-review site Shut Up & Sit Down, recommends Pictomania, which he describes as being “more deep, exciting, and competitive” than the old game-night standard. It’s “a side-splittingly funny” game, he says, because players are asked to draw and guess at the same time, “resulting in remarkably poor drawings and guesses.”