MORE: Check out the hub for all our DIY traditional games from around the world.

MORE: Our favorite math games make math practice fun!

Notes and Variations

As with any traditional game with a long history, Shut the Box has many versions. I always encourage kids and families to explore rule variations to see what works best and how players must adjust their strategy accordingly. The important part is that all players agree on the rules ahead of time!

Try some of the following options:

Option 1: You may not shut more than 2 numbers on a roll.

Option 2: When a player opts to roll a single die, you must be able to shut the die as shown. For example if you roll a 5 with a single die, you must be able to shut the 5, not a 2-3 or a 4-1.

Option 3: For a kid-friendly version, player can use individual die numbers rather than the sum. For example if the roll is 3 and 5 (for a sum of 8), but only the 5 is still open, they could shut the 5 without going out. Note that any numbers must match the quantity show on the dice. They could not mark off a 7 just because 7+1 also equals 8.

Option 4: This version is known as "Unlucky 7." When a player rolls a 7, their turn is over.

Option 5: Traditionally, Shut the Box is played with tiles numbered 1-9. We included a printable version with numbers 1-12 for extended play. Playing with 1-12 is known as "Full House."

Taking Turns: Some kids may not have the patience to wait for another player to take all of their rolls before starting their own turn! In this case, instead of playing one player's full complement of rolls at a time, take turns rolling the dice. Each player should still have their own number line game board, however.

Our family's favorite commercial version of Shut the Box is Blue Orange's Double Shutter, which has provided us hours of entertainment. When my kids were little, before they could play the game properly, we even used Double Shutter for number recognition and counting practice.

The post Shut the Box Printable Game (Instructions and Board) appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

Note: this post contains affiliate links that earn commission from qualifying purchases.

Read more about how we repurpose games for toddlers and preschoolers!

For example, if he rolled a 5 and a 3, we counted the dots and said "5 plus 3 equals 8". Then he could shut tiles 5 and 3 or tile 8. (If this were the actual game, he could shut any combination of numbers that equaled 8). If he rolled a combination of numbers that were no longer visible on the available tiles, instead of ending the game as in the original rules, he rolled again until he got numbers that worked.

Math Skills Practiced

Even without the competitive aspect of game play, repurposing Double Shutter for a young audience helps them practice valuable skills needed for future math success. Add it to your list of playful after school math activities.

My 5-year-old really enjoyed playing the math game and we took plenty of time to count, find the numbers and talk about which tiles to shut. Working side by side with a parent or other caring adult creates a bonding experience that means the practiced math skills are more likely to skick!

The post Easy Math Game for 5-Year-Olds (At Home Practice) appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

Learning how to play chess is a great brain workout. And lots of parents want their kids to learn basic chess skills to give those young brains a boost.

But first...

I have a confession.

I hate chess.

This may be a little surprising seeing as how much I love playing games with my kids.

But chess? Na-uh. So tedious.

However...

My kids LOVE chess and I grudgingly acknowledge learning chess skills has many benefits.

My older son won't play chess with me because he "wants to be challenged." True, it's hard to play chess with someone who doesn't have a strategy (or even cares about having one).

My younger son wants to learn basic chess skills and likes to play chess, but he can't play with his brother because he is whalloped every time and then has a meltdown.

However!

I have now acquired the perfect alternative to chess!

MORE: How to help a sore loser develop good sportsmanship

(Note: this post contains affiliate links that earn from qualifying purchases.)

Solitaire Chess: Magnetic Travel Puzzle

Solitaire Chess is (as the name implies) a single player logic puzzle. It will be enjoyed by chess players, chess learners and even kids who don't really know anything about chess! It's also a great game to take on a road trip along with our other favorite travel games.

How to Play

This single player logic game consists of a spiral bound challenge booklet with a 4 x 4 chess board, 10 magnetic chess piece tokens, and an instruction manual. Challenge maps come in 4 levels, ranging from beginner to expert.

To play the player choses a challenge map, places the chess pieces in the proper locations as indicated by the map.

The goal is to move the chess pieces off the board, until only one piece left at the end. The player must move the pieces according to normal chess movement rules. For example, bishops move diagonally, rooks move in straight lines, etc. Each move must result in a capture.

MORE: Best single player logic games for kids

How Solitaire Chess helps kids to learn basic chess skills

• Solitaire Chess is challenging because the player must think through the entire puzzle sequence before he starts moving the pieces. The instruction booklet provides hints for each challenge map, if kids get frustrated!

  Children can practice typical chess moves without the added stress of competition.

• When thinking through sequences, the player must continue to re-evaluate the result of each move in order to determine a successful strategy to solve the puzzle.

The manufacturer recommends Solitaire Chess for ages 8 and up. Of course many children under 8 can already play chess, so use your judgement!

Solitaire Chess was a 2011 Toy of the Year, a Parent's Choice Gold Medal recipient, and received the Creative Child Magazine Preferred Choice Award.

The second game you will enjoy is Laser Chess. Laser Chess is a Mensa Select winner and won a National Parenting Product Award.

Maybe I will even learn basic chess skills and learn to love chess.

Dare to dream.

But in the meantime I have a substitute that my kids can play without me!

More great games to try: 

• Cat Crimes (a single player logic game)
• The best non-board games for families
• Code Master (learn coding skills offline)
• Watermelon chess! (traditional abstract strategy game)

The post Solitaire Chess Helps Kids Learn Basic Chess Skills appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

As you know, we love to find and play traditional games from around the world. It's fun to see the connections and similarities between board games from different societies. Kids today are very familiar with tic tac toe (also known as naughts and crosses), and 3-in-a-row games have a strong tradition across many cultures.

MORE: Be sure to check out these eight variations of tic tac toe!

Roman tic tac toe is a 2 player game but differs from the modern day game, because it uses a circular shaped playing board and movable tokens instead of being a pen and paper game. But the goal is the same: be the first player to get three in a row!

What You Need

Tokens. You'll need 6 tokens in total: three tokens per player. Use beans, coins, or borrow game pieces from a board game you already own. Just be sure each player's set of tokens is distinguishable from the other.

2 enthusiastic players. Enough said.

Game board. Draw your own our use our printable game board.

• To draw a game board make a large circle. Draw an X through the center of the circle, then draw a cross (+) through the center. It should look like a wheel with eight spokes. At each point where a line intersects with the circle, draw a large dot, plus one dot in the very center. There should be nine dots in total.

Drop phase:

Player A places his token on any point on the Rota wheel.

Player B places her token on any empty point.

Alternating turns, players continue place their tokens on the board until all tokens have been placed.

Move phase:

Players take turns moving one token into an adjacent empty spot. You may move along the curved edge, or along a straight line.

You may not jump your token or your opponent's token, or knock it off it's spot. You may not skip a turn.

Play continues until one player has achieved three-in-a-row.

Unlike tic tac toe, Rota never ends in a tie.

The wheel-like game board can be found carved into floors and streets in Roman buildings that survive in archaeological sites. Intriguingly, historians do not know the ancient rules of the game; the three-in-a-row instructions are speculative. The earliest set of rules I could find was from this 1916 article, "An Old Roman Game" in The Classical Journal.

But no matter what the exact history of the game, it's still fun for modern kids!

The post How to Play Roman Tic Tac Toe (Rota) appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

We love games at the holidays, and this year I am trying something a little bit different with my gift guides with this make your own game kit.  It can be a DIY board game kit or all the fixings for an inventive card game! Inspire your kids to invent their own card, board, or dice games with these open-ended game pieces.

I make it a point to make sure at least one (usually several because I am a nut) family games are under the tree so we can spend the rest of the holiday vacation playing fun new card games and board games.

Think how much quickly the school holiday will whiz by when your children are hard at work decorating their own game cards, painting pawns and coming up with clever strategies! (Note: links and images may be affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

I've also curated all these items, plus more, including "meeples" on an easy to use list over at Amazon. Meeples! Don't you just love that word? Click here to see the guide plus all the extras.

Card Games

Blank deck of cards. Be sure to include a set of permanent markers. What will they make? A standard deck of 52 cards? A whimsical deck? Maybe they will design a specialized deck for a board game they are inventing! The sky is the limit.

Dice

Multicolored and multi-sided dice. What's more fun that a quick dice game with a standard set of 6-sided dice? Why a self-invented dice game using a 10 sided (or more) set of dice! You can get dice in all shapes and sized to inspire kids to roll away!

Blank dice! Kids can use Sharpies to write numbers, letters or even draw pictures on each side. Alternatively, use stickers to decorate each side.

We love having lots of colored dice so everyone can have their own set during game play. The kids always like having their favorite colors.

Game Boards

Blank Game Boards are essential for creating your own board games, of course!

Game Accessories

Spinners. What I love about these transparent spinners is you can use a dry erase marker to change up how you want to use them.

Chips come in very handy. You can make your own with small wooden discs and paint them the color you want. If you want to get really fancy, a box of poker chips will last forever. My kids love using our poker chips for all sorts of activities, as you've probably seen in our fiverton game.

Play Money will be useful if your child loves games like Monopoly and wants to add a financial element to the game.

Game Pawns and Tokens

Make pawns out of  wooden game dolls or meeples! An inexpensive and colorful paint set will inspire your children to design their own pawns to be used in any game. Perhaps they will paint pawns to represent the family. So cute.  Wooden discs that can be painted also come in handy as game tokens. If you've watched any of our game videos, you may have seen our homemade ones.

Make Your Own Board Game Kits

Maybe you'd rather buy a complete kit to inspire your children to make their own board game. There are several available that look like a lot of fun.

This board game set has everything you need, just add imagination! It includes a board, game pieces, blank cards, dice, spinner, rulebook, and timer!

DIY Board Games. This set is not so much an "invent your own games" but rather a "put together your own games" set. There are five boards with stickers and pieces to assemble to play popular traditional games like Snakes and Ladders and The Great Game of the Goose.

Serious board game enthusiasts can learn from game design masters with this informative book, Make Your Own Board Game: Designing, Building, and Playing an Original Tabletop Game by Jesse Terrance Daniels.

Don't forget to check out the full curated list of items here.

The post The Gift You Never Thought Of: Make Your Own Board Game Kit appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

Although parents may not want to play Go Fish on repeat the way kids do, it's a good idea to indulge their request for the card game as often as possible because there are actually a lot of hidden benefits to playing Go Fish!

But first, let's get a handle on what the game is, because Go Fish is one of the 10 card games kids should know!

How to Play Go Fish

For the 6 people left in the world who don't know how to play Go Fish, the instructions are very easy. Although many companies like to sell fancy Go Fish specific card decks, all you need is a standard deck of 52 cards.

Number of players

2-5 players

Objective

To collect as many sets of 4 of a kind as you can. In some variations, players only collect pairs.

Set-Up and Deal

Decide who goes first and who will deal. You can draw cards, play rock, paper, scissors, choose the youngest player, or shout "Not It!." The choice is yours.

The dealer deals 7 cards to each player. If playing with 4 or 5 players, deal out 5 cards to each player.

Place the remaining cards in a pile, face down. This is the "Go Fish" pile.

Play

Players examine their hands and decide what cards they might want to "fish" for. The first player, "the fisher," asks any other player if they have a particular number or face card. For example, "Do you have any 5s?" The fisher must already have at least one 5 in their hand.

If the "fishee" has a 5 they must hand over the card or cards to the fisher. If not, they gleefully say, "Go fish!" and the fisher draws one card from the Go Fish pile.

If the fisher gets one or more cards they asked for, whether from the fishee or the draw pile, they get another go and can ask the same player or another player for a card. They get to keep fishing as long as they continue to be given or draw the correct card. If they do not get the correct card, their turn is over and play continues clockwise.

Once a player as a set of four cards, they lay them down face up.

Play continues in this manner until all thirteen face value cards have been collected by players in sets of four.

The winner is the player with the most sets.

Benefits of Go Fish!

Perhaps one of the reasons kids love Go Fish! so much is because deep down they know that it's teaching them valuable skills and prepping their brains for the long schooling years in front of them!

Okay, maybe not, but it's still great for for early math learning and social skills.

Go Fish! teaches:

• recognition of numerals and quantities
• matching pairs and sorting
• listening and memory skills (Last time Mommy had a 5, but I didn't. Now I do have a 5. "Mommy, do you have a 5?"),
• learning how to take turns

... and, of course, Go Fish is a good starter game for parents who are helping kids who hate to lose learn how to be a good sport (we have more helpful sportsmanship tips here).

So what are you waiting for? Go Fish!

For slightly older kids who are practicing early addition skills, don't forget about TENS GO FISH!

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Turn Over 10 is a clever, mathematical twist on the classic memory card game, making it a great game for kids who are practicing their math skills.

Anyone with a child learning math facts knows that making math practice fun with games and activities is very important! That's why so many teachers and parents use games like Make 10 Go Fish or Math Tic Tac Toe to bolster kids' mental math skills.

Card games are excellent ways to practice math because there are no special math tools and materials to gather, no screens to turn on. Everyone has a deck of cards at home!

So be sure to incorporate the fun math card game, Turn Over Ten, into your child's math curriculum!

What you need

• A standard deck of cards. Remove the 10s, jacks, queens, and kings.
• 2 enthusiastic players (can play with more, but best with 2)

Instructions

Shuffle the deck of cards.

Place 20 cards, face down, in a 4 x 5 array. Place the remaining cards in a stack at the side of the array.

The first player turns over any two cards.

If the cards add up to 10, he collects the cards and takes another turn. If they don't add up to 10, he turns them face down and the second player takes a turn.

At the end of a turn, if a player has removed one or more pairs of cards, he fills the empty spots in array with cards from the remaining stack.

The game ends when players can no longer make any combinations of 10 with the remaining cards.

The winner is the player who has collected the most pairs.

The post Math Memory Game: Turn Over 10 appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

Brain teaser puzzle instructions:

What you need:

8 tokens in two different colors. You could use coins (e.g. four nickels and four pennies) or game pieces (checkers tokens are perfect).

Set up:

Line up the tokens in a row so that four of the first color are followed by four of the second color. For example: orange-orange-orange-orange-blue-blue-blue-blue.

Objective:

Move the colored tokens so that they end in alternating colors. For example: orange-blue-orange-blue-orange-blue-orange-blue.

Rules:

• You are only allowed four moves.
• You must move two adjacent tokens at a time.

I'll give you a minute to try it and solve it before I show you the solution.

....

....

....

Did you solve it?

Watch the video or scroll down for the solution to our fun and quick brain teaser puzzle.

Quick Brain Teaser Solution:

I've numbered the tokens so that it is easier to see the answer. The tokens start out lined up as orange1-orange2-orange3-orange4-blue5-blue6-blue7-blue8.

First move: move 2 and 3 to the end.

Second move: move 5 and 6 to the space that was left between 1 and 4.

Third move: move 8 and 2 to the space that was left between 4 and 7.

Final move: move 1 & 5 to the empty spot.

TA DA!

Don't you feel smart, now?

Try this quick brain teaser for beginners with your children and then then have your child give the puzzle to another grown up and see what happens!

More brain teasers

Kids love to stump their parents or other family members. It gives kids confidence when they see adults working hard on something they have already solved. In fact, brain teasers and puzzles are great party tricks for family gatherings. They are a fun change from the normal board game and charades party fare and a guarantee for lots of laughs.

The post Quick Brain Teaser Puzzle For Kids (and Grown-Ups) appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

One day not so long ago I had the boys on the city bus and the ride was getting rather long for their squirmy selves. I usually use thinking games or screen-free waiting games in a situation like this but I was a bit exhausted and wanted an easy and instant way to keep them from driving me crazy.

Suddenly I broke out into a tongue twister and the boys were riveted.

The boys kept crying "more, more!" and the rest of the ride was filled with giggles instead of groans. So next time you want a screen-free, quick distraction that requires no props but the mouth on your face, try a few of these tongue twisters for kids.

What are tongue twisters?

Tongue twisters are a short series of words that are hard to pronounce accurately and quickly. Often, they include alliteration, shifting patterns of phonemes, or words that, when said quickly, can be confused with other words.

Why practice tongue twisters?

Tongue twisters have long been used by public speakers like actors, news broadcasters, politicians, and other orators as a way to practice pronunciation, speaking ability, and language fluency.

When kids play around with tongue twisters they are learning how sounds work, which helps with reading fluency, as well as exercising the muscles used for speech. In fact, studies show that the brain must work harder to get our mouths to say certain sounds together. So think of tongue twisters as brain boosters!

What are the best tongue twisters for kids?

Kids love tongue twisters because they are both funny and a challenge. Try starting out with short tongue twisters, moving on to longer phrases and even the hardest tongue twisters of them all. Different children will find different tongue twisters challenging, so experiment!

MORE: Put a smile in your child's day with these tongue twister lunchbox notes!

A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk, but the stump thunk the skunk stunk.

Whether the weather is warm, whether the weather is hot, we have to put up with the weather, whether we like it or not.

The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne throughout Thursday.

Classic and famous tongue twisters

I bet you remember these famous tongue twisters from your own childhood!

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. 
Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers? 
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, 
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

Betty Botter bought some butter; “But,” said she, “This butter’s bitter. If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter will make my bitter batter better." So she bought some better butter, better than the bitter butter, put it in her bitter batter, and it made her bitter batter better.

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, Wuzzy wasn’t very fuzzy, was he?

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

The sixth sick sheikh's sixth sheep's sick.

Silly Sally swiftly shooed seven silly sheep.
The seven silly sheep Silly Sally shooed
Shilly-shallied south.
These sheep shouldn’t sleep in a shack;
Sheep should sleep in a shed.

And just for fun, watch Danny Kaye get tongue tied.

The post Tongue Twisters for Kids that Make Them Laugh! appeared first on What Do We Do All Day.

Thus, this easy, no-prep card sorting activity for kids was born.

Attempting to stem the tide of the evening crazies, I handed my four-year-old a box that contained 4 decks of playing cards and a Skip-bo game. The cards were all jumbled up.

Knowing how much all children enjoy sorting, and how much my kid loves numbers, I suggested that he sort them, thinking it might keep him busy for a while.

It worked!

First he worked on sorting the cards so they were organized by deck. All the Skip-bo cards in one pile, all the green-backed cards in another, and so forth.

However, when he was done I knew it wasn't over, yet! As I had enjoyed the quiet this sorting time had afforded me, I wanted to continue the card sorting activity.

MORE: Best Sorting Activities for Preschoolers and Toddlers

I asked him to notice what was "special" about the playing cards. He identified that each card has a number, a color and a suit.

First he sorted the cards by number and letter (king, jack, queen, ace).

And then he organized the cards by suit.

This card sorting game kept him busy for an hour!

Sometimes I feel like the queen of no-prep kids activities.

Originally published 2009, updated 2022.

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