Games you can play with little to no equipment, like hide and seek, and on journeys or while waiting for something, like eye spy and 20 questions.
Right now my 5 year old daughter likes playing rock paper scissors, and ‘guess the animal’, a more limited version of 20 questions.
When she’s older we can play the car number plate game, where you invent phrases to fit the letters as if they were an acronym.
I also invented a very simple game called ‘lies’ where we take turns to very seriously tell silly lie, eg ‘the sky is green’ or ‘I have 3 arms’. At 5 she finds this very entertaining. When she’s older we can try telling either a lie or a truth and the other person has to guess which.
Any less common games you enjoyed playing with your kids, or yourself as a child? Or games you invented in your family?
Taking turns adding to a story. It’s more fun with more people but it can be interesting to see what wacky ideas kids come up with.
My son and I end up having discussions based on word play or deliberate misinterpretation of stuff. As an example, he had a “seek and find” book with a dog that showed up on every page. The instructions said “find Spotty Puppy throughout the book” but when read out loud I’d joke that it said “threw out the book” and spend the whole time chastising the dog for throwing out perfectly good books. We’ve also discussed things like oceans made of jam (sticky, but easier to catch fish from a hovercraft), the consequences of cats gaining opposable thumbs (NO ONE IS SAFE, THE WORLD IS DOOMED), and the behaviour differences between a silly goose and a serious one.
When kids are a little older, here are three that are amazing time-passers:
The Word Game: surely it has a better name, but I don’t know it. Player one thinks of a five-letter word, and tells the first letter. Other players think of a five-letter word that matches all clues, and asks a yes-no question containing a hint. Player one either answers the question by saying what word the OTHER player is thinking, or gives the next letter.
It’s confusing to describe, so here’s what play might look like:
Player one (thinks “tiger”). The word starts with T.
Player 2: Is it what a magician does?
Player 1: No, it’s not “trick.”
Player 3: Does it go with parsley, sage, and rosemary?
Player 1: No, it’s not “thyme.”
Player 4: Is it how a billy-goat crosses a bridge?
Player 1: No, it’s not “tromp.”
Player 4: I was thinking something else, but your answer works, so good enough.
Player 2: Is it a homeless person?
Player 1: No, it’s not “tramp.”
Player 3: Is it sometimes called quest?
Player 1: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Player 3: A TRIBE called Quest?
Player 1: Ugh. Fine. The next letter is “I”.
Player 4: Is it a bunch of things you use in Scrabble?
Then there’s TOAST, or “Think Of A Sentence Together.”
One player gives a five-letter word. Everyone tries to think of a sentence in which each word starts with the next letter of the given word.
So if I say, “TOAST,” player one might say, “Think Of A Sentence Together.” Player 2 might say, “Tigers Only Are Sitting There.” Player 3 might say, “The Owl Ate Sixteen Tacos.”
Everyone shares their sentence, then you come up with a new word.
The published game is awesome and tremendous fun, as long as everyone playing can read and can count syllables. But it’s very easy to play as a purely mental time-passing game. One player just thinks of something to describe, and describes it using monosyllabic words. The other players try to guess.
Player 1 (thinks “tomato”). Uh, this is red fruit, but folks think is not fruit. You smush it and dip fries in it.
Player 2: Ketchup!
Player 1: No, the fruit! The fruit!
Player 3: Tomato!
With The Word Game, part of the fun for me is coming up with tricky questions to baffle Player 1. We have a rule: at least one other player must know what you’re asking about, or else the question doesn’t count. So if I say, “Is it sometimes called Quest?” and nobody else thinks of “Tribe,” it’s an invalid question. I’m also not enough of a jerk to ask questions my kids can’t possibly know (I wouldn’t reference A Tribe Called Quest in a game with zoomers), but you may need to emphasize sporting behavior with folks in the group, depending on how hypercompetetive they are.
This game has kept my kids and their cousins occupied for hours on long car drives.
I saw a game yesterday called “cookie face”. Each person gets an Oreo or similar cookie, tips their head back and places it on their forehead, then must use methods like grimaces and careful head tipping to maneuver it down to their mouth without using their hands or dropping the cookie. Guaranteed to be hilarious for young kids, and you get to eat a cookie!
On road trips we used to play the alphabet game. Start at A and everyone looks at the passing surroundings searching for the letter A in the environment. Can be a road sign, store sign, license plate, etc. Anything outside the car. Whomever spots it yells it out. “A in ‘lane closures ahead’”. They get get a point. Then you move to B and so on. Gets challenging looking for Q and Z in your surroundings.
A few years ago, we noticed a LOT of Kia Souls on the road around here. We made up a game called “Soul Catcher,” in which we collected points by being the first in the car to notice one. Rules began to pop up that created opportunities for more points. A Kermit Green Soul was “it’s not easy.” If paired with a red one, it was a Soul-ho-ho. Four black ones in a row were a “Black Soulbbath.” There were others, but we havent played in a long time…
My brothers and I played that game on road trips with our parents when we were young. Our rules were that the target letter (except for X) had to be the 1st letter of a printed word (billboards, road signs, etc.) or license plate sequence. Embedded letters didn’t count. And everybody progressed up the alphabet independently of the other players. 1st person to complete the entire alphabet won.
I taught my children to play the same way, but on an extended trip down the Natchez Trace Parkway (no billboards and precious few road signs) we adjusted the rules to allow any object with the correct initial letter to count. They were stuck hard at Q until I pointed out a random 4-legged creature along the roadside and said “quadruped”. That one stuck in the family vocabulary for many years to come!
One that is very simple, and I don’t know what it’s called… all you need is pencil and paper. Make a grid of orthogonal dots like, say, 10 x 10. Then each person takes a turn connecting two adjacent dots, either horizontal or vertical but not diagonal. The goal of the game is to complete a square. When a player completes a square they write their initial in it and they go again. The winner is the one with the most squares.
This and other word games sound fun for when she’s older. Right now she’s still learning to read and spell. Her school hasn’t even taught her the alphabet or letter names yet, so we do I spy with the first sound in the word (‘sh’ and ‘ch’ are letters now).
That’s a good idea and we could do it now. There aren’t too many games she can manage yet so it’s good to have some really simple ones.
Wow, I haven’t seen one of those cars in years. My primary school teacher used to have one, and they were old fashioned even then.
We could play it with minis, though. My daughter is good at spotting them, for some reason.
I remember playing that one at school, and I don’t know what it’s called either!
If you’re talking Mini Coopers, I’d say you got a winner there. Needs a cool name like SlugBug, though. I’ll work on it and get back to you if I come up with something. Have fun!
My sister and I had a rummage sale this past weekend. My niece came to help and brought her daughter (5yo). As predicted she became bored after a couple of hours. So I looked up What Would You Rather questions for kids on my phone. We played that for a long time. We all had fun answering the absurd questions and had a lot of laughs.