Games for 5 Year Olds
Five is the age where games start working properly. Turn-taking clicks, a child can hold two or three rules in their head, and they can answer a question about themselves without needing it rephrased three times.
That opens up card games alongside the picture-led activities, and it is the first age where a simple board game is realistic rather than optimistic.
Our games for 5 year olds
Emotions Flashcards
Forty-six cards and three ways to play: a memory game, identify-the-emotion, and snap. Naming a feeling is the part young children find hardest and the part everything else depends on. These cards give them the words by showing the faces first.
Feelings Flipbook: Vegetables Edition
Twenty feelings, each with six things a child can actually do about it. Flip to grumpy and the page suggests going somewhere quiet, playing with toys, listening to music. The cheerful vegetable characters are deliberate: a child in a temper will not pick up something that looks like a lesson.
Feelings Flipbook: Monsters Edition
The same twenty feelings and six practical ideas per page, with friendly monster characters instead. It sits on a shelf so a child can go and find the page themselves when things go wrong, which works when no adult is available.
Magnet Feelings Poster
A magnetic chart for the fridge or a bedroom door. Twenty feelings, and the child moves the marker to whichever fits. A child who says "fine" when asked will happily move a magnet to "grumpy" on the way past.
Board games for 5 year olds: what actually works
A five year old can manage a board game with a short route, one clear goal and a simple action on each space. What they cannot yet manage is strategy, long play or a game that runs for forty minutes.
Matching and memory games are the sweet spot at five. They feel like a proper game to the child, they have a clear winner, and a round finishes before attention runs out.
Our Emotions Flashcards carry three games in one box for exactly this reason: memory, identify-the-emotion, and snap. The same deck goes from calm and careful to loud and fast depending on which you pick, which matters when the mood in the room changes.
What to look for
Two or three simple rules, no more. Five year olds enjoy explaining the rules to someone else, which only works if the rules fit in their head.
Plenty of pictures. Reading is still emerging, and a game that depends on it excludes half the children who would enjoy it.
A reason to talk built into the game, rather than a conversation bolted onto the end.
What to expect
Ten to fifteen minutes of genuine attention, which is a real step up from four.
Strong opinions about fairness. Expect arguments about whose turn it was; that is precisely the skill the game is practising.
Children answer more openly while their hands are busy. Play alongside them rather than opposite them.
More guides
Every guide in this series: 3 year olds, 4 year olds, 5 year olds, 6 year olds, 7 year olds, 8 year olds.