It's Time to Play -- Educational Board Games for All

Whether I’m exposing my kids to a new concept or reinforcing information they have already learned, educational board and card games are a great tool. Research suggests that certain types of board games strengthen math skills in preschoolers – and I think it’s fair to generalize these findings to older kids as well. My kids are almost always eager to play a game with me – but they are usually not so enthusiastic to fill out worksheets – and that enthusiasm often translates into better retention of the information. In addition to academics, kids learn to take turns, follow rules and lose gracefully when playing board and card games.

We have dozens and dozens of games and we play often, usually during lunch time, during a mid-afternoon snack or after dinner. Here are a few of our favorite game-makers:

Gamewright makes a lot of affordable, easy-to-learn and easy-to-transport games that are just plain fun. A few of our favorites are Sleeping Queens (includes addition), Ka-Ching (focuses on multiplication), and Scrambled States of America (geography).

Thinkfun also makes a variety of different games from Rush Hour, which teaches strategy and can be played alone, to Swish, a fun pattern recognition game, to What’s Gnu?, a spelling game.

SET Enterprises makes two of our favorite games: Quiddler, a word game is played in 8 rounds, with players creating short words each round, and Set, a pattern recognition game in which 12 cards are arranged face-up on a table and players look for sets of three that have similarities or differences.

Brain Boxes cover multiple topics, including The World, The USA, Dinosaurs and Nature. Players have 10 seconds to look at a card and memorize as much as possible about it before answering a question. A correct answer gets to keep the card and the winner is the one with the most cards – you can play to 5 cards if you don’t have a lot of time, 10 cards if you have more, and so on. 

Professor Noggin card games also encompass a wide variety of topics including history, art, science and geography. Each card has multiple trivia questions, both easy and hard, so people with different amounts of knowledge can play together. These are great to play in the car.

Birdcage Press makes beautiful games that teach players about art, including Go Fish using famous works of art on laminated cards. The company has expanded to include games about wildlife and nature, air and space, and history; they also make books.

Some of our other favorite games, by subject are:

Language arts

Bananagrams comes with tile letters and players race each other to build crossword grids. Although we’ve used the game this way, it’s also easy to make up your own games, or just leave notes on the kitchen table for each other.

Scrabble – you just can’t go wrong with this classic. It’s super for spelling, strategy and even math, when you are figuring out your score.

In Dabble each players has 20 tiles and has to make a six-letter word, a five-letter word, a four-letter word, a three-letter word and a two-letter word. Great fun!

Geography

Snapshots Across America – we’ve had this game for years, and my kids still enjoy playing it, although it gives me a serious case of wanderlust. Players draw cards to visit attractions in different states, but bad weather can interfere. The person who travels to a pre-determined number of states first wins.

In Great States players take turns drawing cards and answering questions about the United States by referring to the map/board.

Maptangle by Borderline Games includes a large floor mat of the world and players have to reach two locations on the map. This is a fun, active game!

Math

Dominoes  is one of my favorites, and my family indulges me. Although there are many different games you can play with a set, our favorite is a scoring game that uses multiples of five to score. This is another travel friendly game.

Tally Rally is a fun Mindware game in which players create equations using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Mythmatical Battles is a dueling game using multiplication, which features a deck of Greek, Celtic, Norse or Egyptian god, heroes or monsters. My kids love using this game to practice their times tables.  

Of course, there are dozens more games, including classics like chess and Pictionary, and newer games like Ticket to Ride. What are some of your family's favorite games?