My 5yr old son has been really enjoying “game night” on some evenings, and yet our collection is limited to CandyLand, Chutes&Ladders and such for kid-games, or RISK/Monopoly/Chess for more adult games (beyond the ubiquitous Video Games),…. and I’m looking for something a bit more middle-ground.

Kid-friendly but not as easy/boring as Candyland.

He kinda likes UNO, but card games are tougher since he can’t hold the cards properly.  Things like Poker/solitaire/Snap/ don’t quite hold his interest as much mainly due to the whole “hold all your cards” thing.   From what I recall, even the cheap-ass cad games are different enough from “card games” with 4 suits, etc,  that they might be a nice change of pace.   He’s even gotten the concepts of playing FLUXX, which is sometimes too hard, and sometimes too easy, depending on the rules we use.  Still, it’s just cards, which has limited appeal after a while.

Thus,  I’m just looking around mainly for rules-sets online to create our own cheap version of some games.  I had thought something Catan-lite or Carcassonne might be interesting enough for him, or a simplified tabletop RPG/Warhammer type thing might be interesting… but unsure.

Since some of my readers probably have played more of those types of games than I have lately, would you suggest any particular style/name of a game for a very intelligent and awesome 5 year old?

Just thinking out loud, no pressure to provide rule-lists or such. I am mostly looking for inspiration and perhaps a game-name to look up or some-such.  :)
Any thoughts?

One game I created on my own last autumn, which we loved to death for a while, I called “Early bird catches the worm”.

Basically, the game board was a simple “move X# spaces” based on a die roll.  The “start” was up in a tree, and the “finish” was a hole in the ground, with the path of spaces winding through the branches, across the clouds, and down to the ground… all drawn in pen/highlighter on the back of those big desk-size calendar sheets from corporate workplaces.

All players were birds, and the unique catch was having separate game-piece (hunk of play-dough) which started 8-10 spaces away from the finish line and represented the worm. (where the tree-trunk intersected the ground).  Each round, players would roll the die, and move the appropriate number of spaces.  After each player went once, the worm would move one space ahead.

If the ‘worm’ reached the finish before any of the player/birds, no one wins.  Otherwise, first bird to catch the worm won.

This was simple, fun, and the additional non-player worm make an interesting addition to the usual “first one to end wins” and caused great fun and giggles when the birds won and ate the worm.   Of course, over the course of playing this, we added a few house rules like one space that gave you a twig which could be dropped on the worm to make it lose a turn, a feather that let you swoop ahead three spaces, birdseed on hte ground that made you lose a turn, and all manner of “extra complications”.

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