Thanks to the very lovely folks at Raincoast Books, I have some terrific family-friendly GAMES to share with you all! We’ve been inside and staying close to home for an extended period of time due to COVID-19. Now with Spring Break here for a lot kids and families, you might be on the lookout for some simple, easy to set up, and fun games to try out with your kids and/or family during Spring Break- and after! The following games were all tried and tested by by members of our family, including myself, Mr. Fab, our six year old (who helped with the photos!), and our three year old. I hope you and enjoy, and stay safe!

Let’s start with a look at PetitCollage’s Busy Ideas for Bored Kids, the Outdoor Edition and the Rainy Day Edition. These are compact tins with sturdy and icon-labeled cards inside featuring all kinds of creative, active, and quiet ideas. Each tin has 50 cards, with assortment of things to do, try, create, write, or think about. For any activities that require supplies, e.g. for something like rock painting tic-tac-toe, or mud pie, the needed materials are listed. My daughter was delighted by these cards, and we’ve set aside a healthy pile of more ideas to try (we pretty much read through all one hundred cards together!). I love that some ideas are truly easy, with lovely prompts to follow, and not requiring extra materials- i.e Daydreaming! Making a postcard! Bird watching!

The next game we tested out- with all four of us participating- was the What Am I? Game from PetitCollage. A wonderfully simple game, along the lines of an easier Guess Who? or faster twenty questions, this is a quick to set up and fun to play game that is perfectly designed for kids. Players put on colourful cardboard glasses (two in small and two in large sizes), pick a facedown card from the deck, attach it to their glasses without it peaking, get the timer ready and GO! The player then has to ask questions and see if they can figure out the image on their glasses before time runs out! We had a blast with this one, and it was pretty rad to see how much giggly fun we all had, and how terrible I was (truly) playing this game. My guesses were WAY OFF! Our six year old and my husband rocked it. (Our three year old was mostly delighted by the glasses and the adorable images on the cards…and really tried so hard not to shout out the images on the cards!).

Last but not least, we tested out a game called Selfish: Space Edition by Ridleys. A game that blends the ruthlessness of Sorry! with the sometimes grim and sometimes awesome and cool sphere of space, Selfish is a game to test which astronaut (i.e. player) can make it safely to the spaceship. Using Oxygen cards to make steps forward to the spaceship and to survive, you’re at the mercy of other players/astronauts when they have their go: they can pick up cards that take your oxygen away or knock you back with a Laser Blast, or more dastardly tricks. You can also pick up game cards on your turn such as Hyperspace (Yay! You get to move forward!!!!) or Gravitational Anomaly (No!!!! You have to move a space back!!!!). This was clearly the most complicated to set up – there is no game board to follow, but rather “place markers”- and it took a good five minutes or so for us to really get into the rhythm, but once it started rolling, we had fun. And some feelings might’ve gotten hurt. Heh. This one is recommended for ages 7 and up, and understandably, our youngest didn’t play, but our six year old had a (laser) blast!

I received the games featured in this post courtesy of Raincoast Books in exchange for honest reviews and for the purposes of this post. All opinions and comments are my own.