Word games for kids: ideas by age and how to adapt the rules

Three tweaks that work at any age

Before choosing a game, decide how you will adapt it. The age bands on this page are only a guide: a six-year-old who already reads confidently can skip ahead to the next section, and a slightly shy ten-year-old may be very happy sticking with the miming games. Look at the child in front of you, not their birth certificate.

• More time, less rush. The countdown is the number one source of stress. If a game lets you lengthen the turn, do; if you keep time yourselves, count aloud and be generous.
• Nobody gets left out. Avoid knockout rules: whoever gets it wrong isn’t out, at most they miss a turn. A child who watches the others for ten minutes stops having fun long before the game ends.
• Rules in instalments. Explain only what is needed for the first turn and add the rest as you go. For a few more tricks, see the guide on how to explain the rules of a game.

One last thing: the adult running the game is more director than contestant. They read the words, suggest questions and remember whose turn it is. Beating a seven-year-old is no great achievement; making one laugh for half an hour is.

Ages 5 to 7: sounds, rhymes and gestures

At this age many children can’t read yet, or read slowly. The games that work best go through the ears and the body, not the printed page.

Rhyme time

An adult says a simple word and everyone takes it in turns to find a word that rhymes: “cat” becomes “hat”, “mat”, “bat”, “rat”. Made-up words count, as long as they sound right: “zat” is an excellent answer if it makes the whole table laugh. When the rhymes run out, whoever ran out of ideas picks the next word.

I Spy with sounds

The classic observation game becomes a game of sounds: “I spy with my little eye something beginning with mmm…”, and the children look around for the mug, Mummy, the mirror. With the youngest, use the sound of the letter rather than its name: “sss” for sofa is far more intuitive than “ess”.

Charades with a grown-up whispering

In Charades only the mime sees the word and has to get it across without words or sound effects. If the child can’t read, an adult looks at the screen and whispers the word in their ear. Animals and everyday actions are perfect: a child hopping round the living room as a rabbit is a moment nobody forgets. You need at least three players; pick the 120-second turn and remember that passing on a word costs no points.

If the words in the deck are too hard for their age, the game settings let you choose a custom word list instead: a list of words you have written yourselves (dog, brushing your teeth, sleeping, ball) that stays saved and can be reused in the games that support it.

Ages 8 to 10: letters, categories and words to uncover

Once reading is secure, letter games open up and winning starts to matter, so pitch the difficulty carefully.

The alphabet game

Choose a category (animals, food, things you find in the kitchen) and work through the alphabet in turn: A for ant, B for bear, C for camel. Anyone stuck can ask a neighbour for help rather than drop out. Awkward letters such as Q, X or Z can be skipped without argument, or you can accept creative answers: “X for xylophone” always gets through.

A gentle version of Name, Place, Thing

In Name, Place, Thing, the game many families know as “Name, Place, Animal, Thing”, a single phone draws the letter and runs the clock while you write on paper. With children it is worth choosing the categories by hand: instead of cities and rivers, try animals, colours, food and sports. A handful of letters (H, J, K, Q, W, X and Y) stay out of the draw until you switch on Hard mode, and if a letter comes up that floors everyone you can draw another one.

The countdown only starts when someone says they have finished, and the final seconds can be stretched to 20. A house rule that helps a lot: the adult calls stop, and only once they can see the youngest players have filled in at least half their boxes.

Word in Bloom

Word in Bloom is the guess-the-letters game, much like hangman but without the grim pictures: every wrong letter makes a petal fall. On Easy the flower starts with 8 petals, enough to make mistakes without any drama. Children love the mode where players take turns to set the word, because it turns the tables: one of them writes the word and everyone else, grown-ups included, has to work it out. Watching a parent struggle with “platypus” is worth the whole game.

Ages 11 and up: describing without saying

Around the start of secondary school come the games with precise constraints: getting a word across without saying it, or uncovering it with well-built questions.

• Who Am I?: you hold the phone to your forehead and the others can only answer yes, no or maybe. Learning to ask questions that narrow things down (“Is it an animal?” before “Is it a cat?”) is the heart of the game. For beginners you can switch on Category help, which shows the category to the guesser too, and lengthen the turn all the way to no time limit.
• Forbidden Word: the clue-giver gets their team to guess a word without saying any of the banned words on the card. You need at least four players. In the first few rounds, pick the 90-second turn and be lenient about half-words that slip out.
• Trio Sync: two teammates build the clue by adding one word at a time, and the third guesses. It works brilliantly with a child guessing and two adults giving clues: the grown-ups are forced to be concise and to read each other without conferring.

This is also the age when children start asking to play on their own phones. In PartyGames online play is switched off for under-13s and can only be enabled by a parent, who sets a PIN. Every game also works on a single phone passed from hand to hand, with no connection needed.

Adult-and-child teams: how not to steal the show

Pairing an adult with a child is the simplest way to mix ages, with one well-known risk: the adult answers first and the child becomes a spectator.

• The child gives the official answer. The adult can whisper suggestions, but the word that counts is the one the child says.
• Fixed, clear roles. In miming games the child mimes and the adult reads the word; in letter games the adult writes to dictation and the child does the thinking.
• One pair, one name. In team games you can tap each player and choose which team they play on. If instead you want adult and child to count as a single person, play without teams and enter each pair as one player: “Grandad Mike and Leo”, “Dad and Amelia”.
• Bonuses announced up front. With older children and little ones at the same table, a rule such as “the youngest player’s answer counts double” is easy to track on paper. Announce it at the start, not halfway through when someone is losing.

Here is how it might look: at Name, Place, Thing, Freddie (eight) and Auntie Kate form a team. Freddie chooses the words, Kate writes them down and is only allowed to say “try thinking of a fruit” when he gets stuck. At the end of the round it is Freddie who reads the answers out loud: the moment of glory is his.

Heading off the sulks: prevention beats cure

Sooner or later a child who can’t guess anything folds their arms. A few habits make it rarer.

1. Short games. Two ten-minute games are better than one half-hour game. In Charades and Who Am I? you can have the game end after a fixed number of turns per player rather than when someone reaches a target score.
2. Child-sized words. Use a custom word list to load words from their world, such as animals, things around the house and fairy-tale characters, and play them in Charades, Who Am I? or Word in Bloom.
3. Applause for funny attempts. A wrong but creative answer deserves a laugh, not a correction.
4. Cooperative games as a safety valve. If an older sibling always wins, switch to Word in Bloom in All together mode: you win or lose as a group.
5. Stopping at the right moment. Finishing while it is still fun makes them want another game; dragging it out until they are worn out does not.

If grandparents, aunts and uncles are round the table too, you will find more ideas in the guide to family games for all ages; and for the times when the phone stays in a pocket, there are the games with no equipment.