Five is a complicated age for board games. Five-year-olds are just about old enough to play a game by themselves so long as it’s simple, and they’re often fascinated by the idea of structured play that a board game represents. At the same time, they can still find losing difficult to deal with and have very short attention spans.
To make matters worse, a lot of games you’ll find on shelves have worthy educational themes to entice parents, but kids will spot them as tiresome teaching tricks a mile off and demand something more fun. Finding the best board games for kids is no easy task. So here’s a selection of competitive and cooperative games that are easy enough for 5-year-old children to play by themselves where the learning elements are well hidden. And often you’ll find them fun enough to join in yourself, too.
TL;DR: The Best Board Games for 5 Year Olds
- Catapult Feud
- Dragomino
- The Fuzzies
- Stomp the Plank
- Outfoxed!
- My First Carcassonne
- Monza
- Concept Kids: Animals
- Magic Maze Kids
- Animal Upon Animal
- Hoot Owl Hoot
Catapult Feud
The best games for younger children thrive on a mixture of simple rules and compelling premise, and what fits both better than chucking rubber balls to knock down walls of plastic bricks? Each player constructs a castle in whatever shape they like and places a number of troop models about it. Then it’s down to hot, catapult-pinging action as they take turns trying to knock out each other’s troops to win. That’s easily enough to be entertaining for most 5 yearolds by itself, especially with the fun toy aspect of the castles and catapults. But for older or smarter children, there’s also a simple action card system for some basic strategy.
Dragomino
A great way for kids to get into hobby games is to take a concept they’re familiar with – in this case, dominoes – and give it a fresh new twist. Here, the dominoes show different kinds of terrain. Players choose from four such face-up pieces and fit them into a growing landscape, trying to match the terrain on one or both ends with existing pieces. For each such match they get an egg, which is either worth a point or gives them the right to pick from the piece selection next turn. Fast playing with a cute them and very simple to teach and learn, it’s appealing for children while teaching them turn-taking and simple strategy.
The Fuzzies
Most kids love nothing more than knocking over stacks of things, so the classic Jenga has obvious appeal. However, Jenga has various problems for younger children, in particular the time and care needed to stack the bricks, and a problem for adults – the noise! All of these are solved with an added dash of silliness by this game, in which the “tower” is a stack of fuzzy balls, easily set up by squishing them together in the supplied storage tube. A card draw tells players which colour fuzzy they need to pull and stick atop the tower. But make any fall, and you’ll flip the card for a daft penalty, like holding a hand over one eye, for your next pull, and it’s game over if you collapse the tower.
Stomp the Plank
Children may be briefly disappointed by the lack of actual stomping in this otherwise delightful game featuring miniature pirate elephants, but that will soon evaporate among the sheer glee it generates. Your goal is to draw a full set of non-identical cards, and you can keep drawing as long as you like. The catch? As soon as you draw a duplicate, your elephant moves one space along its magnetic plank that’s balancing perilously on the box edge. If you stop early, though, you’ll get to add discs to the end of everyone else’s plank, multiplying their peril exponentially. A hilarious push your luck affair, this has been known to win a few adult fans, too.
Outfoxed!
At 5, cooperative games where no one has to suffer the ignominy of defeat are still a great way of avoiding family arguments. And they don’t come much better than Outfoxed, a game of memory and deduction where players have to find out which of an array of foxy suspects stole the chicken pie. It’s got a neat gizmo which determines whether a given clue, such as a cane or top hat, is something that identifies with the suspect’s picture or not. So by building up visual clues about the culprit your group can slowly eliminate suspects and hone in on the criminal. But each clue risks edging them closer to the edge of the board where they escape, pushing the excitement levels higher at every turn.
My First Carcassonne / Carcassonne Junior
The original Carcassonne is a fairly simple strategy game that’s good for older children and families, but it’s still a bit too much at 5. Instead, you can introduce kids to the same concept with this fun junior version. Like the grown-up iteration, it involves placing randomly-drawn tiles to make a network of roads crisscrossing a pastoral scene. But it flips player piece placement on its head, as when a road is complete, players put down matching color pieces from their stock. The first player to put down all their pieces wins. Visually attractive and simple to play, it’s a great way to learn basic strategy concepts.
Monza
HABA are a German company that makes great children’s games with bright, chunky wooden pieces and simple strategies to engage little imaginations. Monza is no exception, using basic concepts to create a fast, fun racing game. The track is divided into coloured spaces and on their turn, each player rolls six colour-spot dice. They then try to plot a course around other drivers and no-go spaces matching the colours they’ve rolled to board spaces. It’s intuitive to play and a great mix of luck, excitement and a little skill.
Concept Kids: Animals
Concept is a clue-giving game for adults but it also comes in this cooperative kid-friendly version based on animals. The board is full of icons that depict things like color, size, habitat and body shape. One player has a random animal card they can’t see but other players can, and those players have to use the board icons to help the guesser get their animal. It’s a nice level of difficulty for children, plus it has an educational element and is playable without text at a time when kids are still learning to read, making it a great all-around activity for the family or for kids to play on their own.
Magic Maze Kids
Yet another game based on a franchise for grown-ups (see the best board games for adults, btw), Magic Maze Kids ditches several aspects of the original that aren’t kid-friendly, such as silence and the thievery theme, in favour of animals collecting potion ingredients. It keeps the escalating tension of cooperating to try and move pieces around a board as a sand timer trickles down toward a group loss. All the players can move all the board pieces, but each player can only move them in certain directions: the goal is to get particular pieces to particular spots while navigating obstacles. With tutorials to teach them the game and lots of bright chunky pieces, Magic Maze Kids will provide them with an amazing time.
Animal Upon Animal
Another HABA game, this one leverages a popular kid-friendly mechanic, that they’re often better at than adults: dexterity. Faced with an array of cute but irregular animal pieces, the goal is to get rid of all your pieces by balancing them atop one another in the middle of the table. A dice roll dictates your options for the turn, and instead of stacking may see you extending the stack base or even giving an animal to another player, lending some extra excitement besides the risk of a toppling pile. Best of all, unlike many games on this list, Animal Upon Animal is just as much fun for grown ups.
Hoot Owl Hoot
As you might imagine from a publisher called Peaceable Kingdom, Hoot Owl Hoot is a cooperative game where the group win or lose together. Your aim is to get all the baby owls back to their nest before sunup by moving them along a track of coloured spaces. You can vary the difficulty level by changing the number of owls, which is a nice touch. Each player has a hand of cards which can move an owl to the next space of the matching colour, leapfrogging owls along the way by calling “hoot hoot.” But if you’re unlucky enough to draw a sun card, you have to play it and advance the timer toward the game end for some added excitement.
How to pick games for 5-year-olds
Even the most attentive parents can sometimes overestimate what kids this age are capable of, especially if you’re someone that’s into board games yourself. But in reality, while even small children love to play board games, most of them have only the most basic reading and maths, their attention spans are limited, and the idea of taking even the smallest step further toward planning a turn ahead is beyond them. Instead, games for this age group are best focussed on teaching them how to play a structured game: the etiquette of turn-taking, dealing with the upset of loss, and the fact that many games are designed so they can be “exploited” in some way to make winning easier. That means that, for the most part, you’ll be playing the games with them rather than leaving a group of children to play by themselves.
Two things lend themselves very well to both these criteria: cooperative games and dexterity games. In the former category, you can guide your children gently toward the expected behaviours and lay pointers for them to try and work out the winning tricks by themselves. If they manage to figure it out, they’ll be delighted, and it’s a real moment of wonder. Plus, a joint loss against the game itself is far easier to take than losing against a parent or a peer. The latter, meanwhile, is a genre where kids can generally compete with adults on a much more level playing field, as there’s often little or no strategy and small, nimble fingers can be a real match for a grown-up’s clumsy paws.
Another thing to be aware of is that a lot of games aimed at this age group are marketed as “educational”, and kids have an extraordinary built in alarm that seems to go off whenever a self-improvement activity is offered to them in the guise of fun. They’re much less likely to engage with it as a result, and these kinds of edutainment titles tend to have a short shelf-life. Remember, when it comes to young kids, almost everything they’re involved in is educational in some way, even if it’s not obviously school related. Games of any kind help teach them good social etiquette, basic maths and the foundations of logical planning.
For older kids, take a look at the best board games for teens. And for more ideas, check out our roundup of all the best board games to play right now.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
