If you know me or read my about page, you’ll know that my family really loves to play games together. It’s how we spend a lot of our quality time, especially in these cold winter months. We play I Spy, video games like Mario Kart or Mario Party, board games and card games. I even have an ever-growing list of educational games from Amazon for homeschooling too!
I get asked all of the time about what games we play the most with our 4-year-old so I made a list of our absolute favourites! The ones we reach for over and over. I also have links to easily buy the games and I earn a small commission if you buy from them. That money will be going directly back to more games for our kiddos so thank you!!
Check out our 4-year-old’s absolute favourite board and card games below:
This game is AMAZING for teaching kids their letters and to reinforce their sounds. Players choose a letter card from their hand, say its sound and find an object on the board that starts with that letter. The goal is to get 5 of your colored chips in a row first! The letters each have a corresponding color to help kids find a match.
A classic! This took a little bit for my 4-year-old to understand but once she did… it was hilarious! Watching her get creative with acting out the different cards is so much fun and it has the option to go by a photo or to choose from a shortlist of words for older players.
Peaceable Kingdom games are definitely a hit in our house! They involve working together as a team to win the game. In this one, you have to match colors to get the owls back in their nest before the sun comes up. Some of the Peaceable Kingdoms are a bit easy for our daughter now but they’re a great (usually quicker) game when we want to spend some quality time together. We are also just now beginning to teach our 2-year-old how to play some of these games with us so this is an easy introduction for her.
Match games are great for any age. My daughter often plays match games with her grandmother and this one has the bonus of being educational. You match the birds with each other by the male and female of each type. I was so surprised when my then 3-year-old knew exactly what each bird was called and what it looked like.
We also have the Match a Leaf version and the Butterfly version.
I love how this game can change in difficulty for various ages. You can match colors, shapes and numbers separately or by choosing 2 (example – color and shapes). The goal is to hide all of the little bugs under the rug before you get 3 stink bugs on the board. The stink bugs appear if you spin the wheel and there is no match left on the board. Our 2-year-old is currently obsessed with this one.
Another Peaceable Kingdom game. The goal is to match all the ingredients to add them to your soup before your fire goes out. We did find a loophole to win every single game but I’m not going to share it. I don’t want to make it too easy on you!
This is fun game was actually created by a 6-year-old! Your goal is to have the most amount of points at the end of the game or to reach 50 points first. You gain points by gathering up queens. You can do this by waking them up or stealing a queen from another player. This game is rated for ages 8+ but our 4-year-old plays it just fine.
Bonus: It may not be a board game but we love “things to spot” books like this one for learning their alphabet and this big one! Usborne has quite a few of these types of books. I especially love them for long car rides!
Does your family play a lot of games? I want to hear what ones you’re loving by sharing them over in the Facebook group (Motherhood in the Annapolis Valley & Beyond)!
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