I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I find playing with my four-year-old a little bit….boring. GASP. I know, I’m a terrible person for not always enjoying rounds and rounds of racing cars, broken legs/getting sick/hospital visits, or some strange version of House. But lately I’ve been delighted to see Axton really getting into games. Like, real games – bored games, card games, you name it. He got a ton of new ones for his birthday and they’ve helped make playtime much more enjoyable for this Mama! I’m reviewing some our favorites (and not-so-favorites), starting with the classics!
This one is probably an all-around favorite for both of us. Axton loves it because he wins almost all the time, and I love it because it’s reinforcing his colors to him. It also teaches him to not freak out when he has to backwards….this was actually a hard lesson for him to learn. We played this game together about a year ago and he just wasn’t mature enough for it then. Everytime he drew a card that made him go backwards, he would throw a legit tantrum, so I gave up on this game for awhile. Now he handles it much better.
This one is still a bit ahead of Axton. The board is too clustered for him to be able to tell where one box stops and another starts, so he really struggles with counting how many spaces he needs to go. Right now whenever we play this game, I just end up frustrated with him because all I’m doing is moving his piece around for him. I’m going to give this one another year.
This is such a simple game that this one almost borderlines on boring for me. Actually, it is boring – so I usually only last for one round of this game. But Axton loves it. I think it’s the tiny pieces, and the tiny little buckets, that make him love this game (and two additional reasons why I don’t love this game).
The moment I realized Axton was intellectually ready for Blokus was kind of a life-changer for me. It was almost surreal, with Adam, myself, and Axton all sitting around the table while Rhenner napped. We were all enjoying the game, and enjoying each other, and it was fun and still challenging for all of us on our own levels, and I kind of had this glimpse of life with an “older kid,” and how so very different that is from life with a baby. Is that even making sense? Anyway….Blokus is awesome. All you do is place odd-shaped tiles onto the board, and the only requirement is your tiles can’t touch along the sides, only at the corners. Axton picked up on it really quickly and I’m looking forward to many games of this in the future!
This game was actually given to Rhenner as a birthday gift, but he’s not quite ready for it. It comes with a cute little barn and these round little farm animals. Just like in the card game Uno, you have to either match the figures to either their color or their type of animal. Axton easily fell in love with this game because he loves matching games. There is a “skunk” – which means the player has to draw two additional animals – that Axton whined about for the first few games, but he’s since gotten used to it and now loves to use it against me!
This one is super fun for any Disney lovers! It’s a huge 6-foot-long board, covered in different scenes from Disney movies. The point is to get to the castle before the stroke of midnight. You move forward with a spinner, and also by picking up cards and searching for different objects within the scenes on the board – like dishes, the number 8, ladders, etc. I like that when you’re searching for objects on the board, it’s a team effort. The only issue Axton has with this one is that some of the objects are super tiny and difficult for him to find, so he struggles to get any before the timer runs out. I also dislike that the “timer” is just a sand hourglass, so there is no way of knowing when the timer runs out when both of you are leaning over the board and not paying any attention to it. I may start using my phone or a timer with a buzzer – and also give us more time than just one minute to find the objects!
Jake and the Neverland Pirates Treasure Hunt Game
This is a fun get-up-and-move game! There are different treasures that you place in different rooms around the house, and once you find the matching pieces for the coordinating treasure, then you have to run and go grab it, using only Jake’s sword to carry it back. It’s silly, quick, easy to learn, and gets kids running!
The next three games are not games intended for kids, but we’ve modified them and we make our own kids’ versions out of them! Qwirkle just has tons of blocks with various shapes in different colors. Sometimes we use them as dominoes, stacking and building with them. Other times we play a matching game. But our favorite is a speed game with them – whoever gets all the blocks in “their” color, wins. It teaches Axton to spot colors quickly and to also have quick reflexes.
Bananagrams are basically just Scrabble tiles – little tiles with letters on them. We just use them to make different words with them, and show how rhyming words are the same but with different beginning letters. It’s a fun, tactile introduction to spelling, words, and reading.
A Deck of Playing Cards
As of right now, we just play matching games with a deck of cards (matching numbers of the same color). But I think Axton would be ready to play War – you know, whoever lays down the card with the higher number wins that round and you keep going until one person has all the cards. I definitely think he understands the concept of which numbers are higher, so this will be our next game to try!
add a comment
+ COMMENTS