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40 Board Games for 3 to 5 Year Olds
From classic to brand-new, here are 40 of the best board games for kids.
1. Candyland
Such a timeless classic, players encounter all kinds of "delicious" surprises as they move their cute gingerbread man through a magical land of sweets to try to reach the castle first.
2. Cat in The Hat I Can Do That!
This game also involves silly movement and challenges. Players turn over 3 cards with unique challenges, like putting the cardboard fish under your elbow and tiptoe to the sink and back. If you can do the challenge you turn over, you keep the cards.
An oversized game board for players spy as many items as they can to move ahead on the board. The goal is to get to the picnic before the pigs eat all the food.
4. Perfection
Kids have to match shapes correctly while being challenged to race against the clock. Kids love when the pieces pop up when time runs out.
This is a fun, fast-paced game where the is for each player to collect as many marbles as possible with their hippo. Once the marbles are released, you have to press your hippos mouth open as many times as you can to catch the most marbles.
6. Monkey Around Game and Board Book Set
This game includes lots of activities that gets kids moving. From marching to balancing to hopping, kids get to practice gross motor skills with a fun beanbag banana.
7. Shopping List Memory Game
This is a fun memory game where players race to be the first to fill up their shopping baskets with the items on their lists. Players have to match items on their shopping list with matching item tiles that are faced down, so players have to remember where items are located in order to retrieve them.
8. Pete the Cat: The Missing Cupcake Game
This is such a fun, engaging game for preschoolers. To get Pete’s cupcake back from Grouchy Toad, kids have to name objects, sing songs and act out charades.
This relay-style game has players racing to build stack flapjacks, one item at a time. The game builds gross motor skills, balance and coordination and helps kids practice patterning.
10. Ladybug’s Garden Memory Game
A cute memory game that also helps kids practice motor skills to fit the ladybugs in the holes.
11. Where’s Bear?
Parents and kids take turns hiding a wooden bear under one of six sturdy nesting blocks decorated as rooms in a house and then try to find him. This game combines preschoolers’ favorite activities—stacking blocks and finding hidden objects.
This game helps kids practice fine motor skills as they try to place beans in the wobbly plastic jar without tipping it over.
The object is to keep Philip the Penguin on top of the ice, but as the game goes on the ice blocks start falling.
14. Feed the Woozie
There are several ways to play this game. In the simple version, players roll a die to determine how many pieces of food to “feed” the Woozie. Players have an extra challenge of walking across the room balancing the food on the spoon.
15. Alphabet Bingo
Bing is such a classic game and this one is perfect for preschoolers as it helps them with letter recognition with both uppercase and lowercase letters.
16. My Feelings Game
This game provides a fun way for children to explore their own emotions and acquire a range of constructive ways of expressing feelings.
This games is specially designed for kids. It gets kids moving around as they have fun acting out clues.
18. Colorama
Players roll two dice to get a color and a shape and have to locate a matching spot on the board. There are different levels of play for different groups.
This game is for older preschoolers who are ready for a bit of strategy play. Players work together to create a path to reach the treasure before the ogre does.
Six snails of different colors have a race across the board. All the snails are used no matter how many players you have. Players take turns rolling colored dice to move the matching snail closer to the finish line.
21. Hoot Owl Hoot
This is one of the very first cooperative board games for kids we tried. Everyone works together to get the owls back to their nest before the sun comes up. It’s a good educational game as kids work on colors, patterns, and strategy--which also makes it great for older and younger kids to play together.
Players try to get up all the ladders to the top of the board while avoiding the slides down. The game uses a spinner to tell players how many spaces to move. It requires no reading, but it gives preschoolers practice counting.
23. The Sneaky, Snacky Squirrel Board Game
Players compete to see who can fill their stump with acorns first. Players spin a spinner to see which color acorn to pick up with their squirrel tongs. They may also spin to pick an acorn, steal an acorn, or lose an acorn.
24. Disney Classic Characters Matching Game
This is a classic memory matching game where one or more players attempt to turn over two matching cards from a large group. This game will help your child strengthen matching and memory skills. This version has 72 cards (36 matches).
25. Hi Ho! Cherry-O
This is a fun way to practice counting and basic addition and subtraction. Each player has a different kind of fruit—cherries, blueberries, apples, or oranges. Players spin a spinner and attempt to pick all the fruit from their trees.
26. UNO MOO!
This game is similar to Uno, but it uses farm animal pieces instead of cards. When it is your turn, you play an animal that matches the color or type of the one currently on the barn door. There are also farmers that are wild “cards” and skunks that act as a skip.
27. Frankie’s Food Truck Fiasco
This game helps kids practice matching basic shapes while helping Frankie the Cat create his food truck meals. It’s great to help kids practice fine motor skills as kids use the Frankie-shaped “squeezer” to move the board game pieces around.
Players try to match animal body cards with the correct animal head card. Any time the cards don’t match, all players have to walk around the circle like the animal body showing while making the noise of the animal head. For example, you may have to walk like a horse while making monkey sounds. If you do have a match on your turn, you keep the cards. The player with the most matches at the end wins.
The game comes with a big plush die and 48 game cards. Your child rolls the die and you ask them to do the action on a matching color card. Examples are: sing a song, find something red, or roar like a lion.
30. Banana Blast
This game provides lot of laughter as suspense as players remove the bananas one by one to see which one makes the monkey jump.
There’s an ice cream scoop that you spin to find out what out what flavor of ice-cream you are looking for—and the spinning never gets old with kids in this age group! There are two levels of play, one easier and one more challenging, which lets kids grow with the game.
This is a fairly quick game, just play a card from your hand, and place your chip on the corresponding character on the board – the first with four chips in a row wins.
You stack cute little animals on each other – and try not to be the player who knocks them all down! Younger kids will knock them down often, but it’s great for dexterity practice and the cute animals are a hit regardless of how high the stack gets.
34. Operation
A popular family game, you try to remove little plastic body parts without touching the sides with the tweezers—which makes the buzzer go off. It can be pretty challenging for a three year old but it’s a great manual dexterity exercise—and they enjoy setting off the buzzer!
35. Toddler Scavenger Hunts at Home
The cards contain items commonly found around the home, such as toys, books, clothing, furniture and much more. They have simple questions and prompts to guide your toddler.
This game includes a motorized spinning board, 4 non-magnetic fishing poles and 21 fish. The fish open and close their mouths while the fishing board spins. it even has music and LED lights.
37. Spot It! Junior Animal Card Game
Little ones love this game! It’s very much like the ice cream game mentioned previously, so I would only purchase one of the two. This is a fun and fast-paced game and since kids have to find the same elements on two cards, it gets them to look at things in detail.
38. Go Fish
This is a classic game. It’s pretty much what it sounds like—you “go fish” by drawing from a pile of cards, and try to get pairs of matching numbers or colors and then you can ask other players if they have the card you’re looking for.
39. Guess in 10 Junior Animal Kingdom
The game includes guider tiles to ask up to 10 questions to guess the animal on the game card. Sample questions are Where does the animal live? Does the animal have 4 legs? What does the animal eat?
Players work together to help the mother hen collect her chicks and bring them back to the coop. If they are successful, everyone wins!