Do you play board games with your older children? We are finding out that playing games provides us with an excellent opportunity to spend time together as a family and enjoy each other’s company. We have taken a poll with a number of our young friends and following is a list of ours and theirs favorite games. When you scroll through the list, you may find an interesting theme in these games: All our friends seem to enjoy strategy games!
10 Favorite Board Games for Older Children
1. Chinese Checkers
This is a superb strategy board game and can be played by two, three, four, or six people. The objective is to race different colored marbles across the board to their new home. The one who reaches the home first, wins.
2. Risk
The objective of this game is to conquer the enemies’ territories. This is achieved by building an army and engaging in battle. Risk board game provides a perfect opportunity to learn an important life lesson: There is no action that is not followed by a consequence.
3. Ubongo
Ubongo is a geometric puzzle game where players solve individual puzzles of interlocking shapes. The timer is set and the faster each player solves the puzzle, the more rewarding gems they receive. The player with the greatest number of gems wins.
4. Catan
The goal of this fun strategy game is to trade, build and settle the Island of Catan. Players work on spreading their settlements across a board for victory points.
5. Ticket to Ride
Ticket to ride is a fun strategic adventure board game in which players collect train cards in order to claim various North American railway routes. The length of their routes determines the number of points they get.
6. Carcassonne
In this game players develop a landscape of a medieval fortress city by placing tiles of cities, roads, monasteries, and fields and gain followers. The points are gained by having strategic placements of tiles and the most followers on tiles.
7. Acquire
This board game turns players into investors who purchase hotel chains in order to gain as much profit as possible. It requires a basic understanding of math and how stocks work but is easy to learn with an open mind.
8. Othello
Othello is a great strategy game to learn and test spatial reasoning and other math skills while having fun. Two players take turns placing disks of their assigned color (black or white) on the board. The goal is to get the majority of disks on the board at the end of the game.
9. Go
Although Go can remind you of Othello with similar grid board and game pieces, Go is much more complex. Two players are placing disks of their assigned color on the board and these are captured by the opponent and removed from the board. The game ends when the board is full and nothing more can be done. The player who has the most pieces on the board and has captured more territory is the winner.
10. Chess
Everybody knows chess but not everybody can understand it or play it well. In this game chess players make smart moves that are focused on achieving their objectives; there are five different objectives to choose from. Even though chess can be a relaxing game while played in a home environment, it is not unusual for high-level players lose 10 to 12 pounds on average over a 10-day tournament.
