Board games are a great way to have special family time. They also provide a great way to spend quality uninterrupted time with your children. What’s better than that? Not much in my opinion 🙂

Board games also help parents and caregivers:

• Teach about teamwork
• Model turn taking and patience
• Demonstrate how to be a good sport and win and lose gracefully

Additionally, board games benefit children’s brain and language development in many ways! I recently have had a lot of questions coming in about which board games are good options for preschoolers. Check out some of our favorites below!

Hi Ho Cherry-O

Hi Ho Cherry-O is currently my daughter’s favorite board game to play! 

How to Play: Each person takes turns spinning the spinner and adding the specified number of fruit to their basket.

Bonus: An entire game can be played in about 5-10 minutes. 

Game Benefits: 

Color Recognition: Each fruit is a different color, you can discuss the colors with your child. 

One-to-one Number Correspondence: Children count the fruit as they place them in their basket or on the game board.

Fine Motor Practice: Each player has to carefully place the small pieces of fruit onto the game board and into their basket.

WARNING: This game might be dangerous to children who still put small objects in their mouths. The pieces are very small. Recommended for Ages 3 and Up

Let’s Go Fishing

Let’s Go Fishing is a challenging yet fun game for preschoolers. My 3 year old daughter has just started to get the hang of this game after about a month of playing the game.

How to Play: The game includes four plastic fishing poles twenty-one colorful fish. The board rotates around and the object of the game is for each player to catch as many fish as possible as quickly as possible. The player with the most fish wins.

For children who are just learning how to play the game, you can make it a little easier by taking turns catching fish. You can also change up the rules a bit to focus on certain skills.

Game Benefits: 

Color Recognition: The game contains 21 colorful fish. You can work on identifying the colors of the fish as you catch them, or you can have your child only catch certain color fish.

Number Correspondence: Children will count how many fish they caught. They can compare how many they caught with the other players to see who has the most.

Fine Motor Skills: This game requires a lot of hand eye coordination! It can be quite challenging for preschoolers at first as they have to maneuver the plastic fishing rod into the open mouths of the fish to pick them up and “catch” them. It is wonderful for their motor development, but beware they may get frustrated at first! This is normal.

WARNING: This game might be dangerous to children who still put small objects in their mouths. Recommended for Ages 4 and Up.

Spot It

Spot It technically isn’t a board game, but it is a great matching game for preschoolers. We have the Spot it Jr. Animal version, but they have tons of other variations for letters, colors, numbers, and more!

How to Play: There are a few variations of the game. We play the “Twins’ version of the game. One player takes two cards from the pile and places them face up on the table. All players try to find the matching animals on both cards at the same time. As soon as a player finds the match they shout it out. For example, “FLAMINGO”. The player who has the most cards at the end wins.

Game Benefits

Visual Perception: Children have to look at the cards and find the animals that are the same.

Language Development: With over 30 animals, children learn the names of animals and are expanding their vocabulary.

Counting: At the end of the game, children can count their cards. The player with the most cards wins the game.

Does your preschooler enjoy playing board games? Leave some of your favorite games in the comments below!

Disclosure: This post contains Amazon affiliate links.