My son’s 5th birthday is coming up and I would like to gift him a board game. Usually only the two of us play and he likes for example Carcassonne Junior, Brandon the Nrave or Karuba Junior. Any good suggestions for a new game, maybe also something collaborative?
I’ve tried compiling all the suggestions from this thread, with BGG links.
I have a 4 and 6¾-year-old, but our game collection doesn’t quite fit the audience, and we usually end up playing Star Of Africa with heavily dumbed-down house rules (and it’s already a pretty dumb game to begin with) to keep it interesting for the little one.
This thread is gold! 😍
… Sorry I’ll finish this up later on desktop, this is too fiddly on mobile 😅
EDIT I’ve tried 3 times now to get this updated, and each and every time I’ve managed to swipe up by mistage in WefWef and lost the entire thing 😭 Will have to give it another try later, in another app 😔
Dragonomino is a kid version of King Domino. I just bought it for my kid based on a review. I haven’t played it yet but it seems like it’s a win
To chime in here, we bought Dragomino for similar reasons, found it really boring and went with king domino, which is playable for a 5 year old that has some experience with Board games. Since all info is public the parents can give advice when the child gets stuck or tries to place a tile wrong. Our son did pick it up really fast (ymmv).
My recommendations would be karak as an introduction to dungeon crawlers, ice cool for dexterity, stone age junior for the memory advantage of kids and king domino as the next step
Thank you! Karak is on my to play list, but do you think that it is already suitable for a 5 year old?
These were all mentioned already, but Dragonomino, Rhino Hero, and Animal Upon Animal are pretty good. We’ve had fun with Dinosaur Escape Game and Busy Busy Bake Shop as well (but they skew a little younger, maybe).
I found tbis site to be a good resource: https://weplay2learn.com/
They take the approach that games that are designed to teach fail at being fun and fail st teaching because no one wants to play them. But games that are designed to be fun can actually provide some teaching (not that you were necessarily asking about education, but I think it’s a good take either way).
Kids version of Ticket to Ride is loved by my 6 year old.
TtR first journey is great because it’s easy to transition to the “full” game after they outgrow it. Catan junior is similar in this. That’s also my main complaint about Stone Age kids, it’s not really the same game.
